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THE NON-ACTOR: WEEK ONE

Film Society of Lincoln Center series highlights classic works featuring nonprofessional actors, including Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew

Film Society of Lincoln Center
Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Francesca Beale Theater, 144 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
November 24 – December 10
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org

Ever since the invention of the motion picture, men and women have been trying to capture real life on film at twenty-four frames per second, not only in documentaries but in works of fiction. The more believable a situation or character feels, whether in a crime drama, sci-fi tale, Western, or romantic comedy, the more successful the movie often is. And now, in the age of social media and the YouTube star, the time is ripe for “The Non-Actor,” an ambitious twelve-day series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center consisting of more than forty films from around the world made between 1928 and 2013 featuring nonprofessional actors in lead or key roles. In addition to the below films, the series, running November 24 to December 10, includes such wide-ranging highlights as Ousmane Semebene’s Black Girl, Spencer Williams’s The Blood of Jesus, Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames, Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World, Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero, Sergei Eisenstein’s October, and Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story. As the late Robin Williams famously said: “Reality . . . What a Concept.”

Apu (Subir Banerjee) watches life unfold in his small Indian village in Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali

PATHER PANCHALI (SONG OF THE LITTLE ROAD) (Satyajit Ray, 1955)
Friday, November 24, 1:30, and Sunday, November 26, 6:00
www.filmlinc.org

A groundbreaking work in the history of world cinema, Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali and its two sequels, Aparajito and Apur Sansar, have been meticulously restored by the Criterion Collection and the Academy Film Archive following a nitrate fire in 1993 — the year after Ray was awarded an honorary Oscar on his deathbed. Inspired by a meeting with Jean Renoir in Kolkata, where Renoir was shooting The River, and watching ninety-nine films in six months while working as a graphic designer for an advertising agency in London, Ray decided to make his first film, adapting Bibhutibhushan Banerjee’s 1929 novel, which he knew well; Ray had contributed illustrations to a later edition of the book. The film took nearly five years to make as Ray faced repeated financing problems, such delays as cattle eating flowers that were needed for an important scene, and a cast and crew primarily of nonprofessionals. Despite all those issues, Pather Panchali is a stunning masterpiece, a bittersweet and captivating tale of a rural family mired in poverty, struggling to survive in extremely hard times. In a small village, Sarbajaya (Karuna Banerjee) is raising her daughter, Durga (Runki Banerjee), a rambunctious teen, and son, Apu (Subir Banerjee), while her husband, dreamer Harihar (Kanu Banerjee), a wannabe playwright and poet, goes off for months at a time, trying to find work in the city. (The actors shared a common surname but were not related in real life.) Sarbajaya is also caring for their elderly cousin, “Auntie” Indir (retired theater actress Chunibala Devi), who walks very slowly, hunched over and with impossibly leathery skin. The family goes about its business from day to day, as the kids play with friends, figure out how they can get something from the sweets man, and hang out with Auntie, who offers a fresh perspective on life. Sarbajaya is embarrassed that she cannot pay back several rupees she owes her relatively wealthy neighbor, who owns an orchard from which Durga steals fruit. It’s a meager existence, but it avoids being completely dark and bleak because of Auntie’s sense of humor and Apu’s wide-eyed innocence. The film is told from his point of view — in fact, the first time we see him, he is lying down, covered, and one of his eyes pops open, dominating the screen. It’s a difficult, challenging life, but there’s always hope.

Durga (Runki Banerjee) offers Auntie (Chunibala Devi) a stolen treat in Pather Panchali

The episodic Pather Panchali was heavily influenced by Italian Neorealism while also evoking works by Ozu, Kurosawa, and Renoir, providing an alternative to the flashier, popular Bollywood style. First-time writer-director Ray and first-time cinematographer Subrata Mitra maintain a lyrical, poetic pace, accompanied by a traditional score by sitar legend Ravi Shankar. The film succeeds both as a cultural testament, lending insight into the poor of India, as well as a fully realized cinematic story; it won the country’s National Film Award for Best Feature Film while also earning Best Human Document honors at Cannes. Sarbajaya, Durga, Apu, and Auntie are almost always barefoot, wearing the same clothes, scraping the bottom of the pan with their fingers for that last grain of rice, but there’s an elegance and grace, an intoxicating honesty, to their simple, laborious daily lives. Ray would go on to make such other films as Teen Kanya, Jalsaghar, Ashani Sanket, Devi, and Agantuk, but he is most remembered for “The Apu Trilogy,” which looks absolutely gorgeous in the new 4K restorations, reaffirming its lofty place in the coming-of-age pantheon alongside François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series. Pather Panchali is being shown November 24 and 26 in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “The Non-Actor.”

De Sica Neorealist classic is the heartbreaking story of a man and his dog

De Sica neorealist classic is the heartbreaking story of an elderly man and his faithful dog

UMBERTO D. (Vittorio De Sica, 1952)
Friday, November 24, 4:00, and Wednesday, November 29, 1:00
www.filmlinc.org

We don’t think we’ll ever stop crying. Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist masterpiece Umberto D. stars Carlo Battisti (a professor whom De Sica saw one day and thought would be perfect for the lead role; it would be Battisti’s only film) as Umberto Domenico Ferrari, an elderly former bureaucrat who is too proud to sacrifice his dignity in order to pay his mean-spirited landlady (Lina Gennari), who rents out his room by the hour while he’s out walking his beloved dog, Flag, and trying to find some way to get money and food. Umberto D. is befriended by the boardinghouse maid (Maria Pia Casilio), who is pregnant with the child of one of two servicemen, neither of whom wants to have anything to do with her. As Umberto D.’s options start running out, he considers desperate measures to free himself from his loneliness and poverty. His relationship with Flag is one of the most moving in cinema history. Don’t miss this remarkable achievement, which was lovingly restored last decade by eighty-six-year-old lighting specialist Vincenzo Verzini, known as Little Giotto. Umberto D. is screening November 24 and 29 at the Walter Reade Theater and will be preceded by Cesare Zavattini and Francesco Maselli’s half-hour Story of Caterina, from the omnibus Love in the City.

The tender love between a young girl (Anne Wiazemsky) and a donkey lies at the heart of Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar

AU HASARD BALTHAZAR (Robert Bresson, 1966)
Saturday, November 25, 4:00, and Tuesday, November 28, 4:00
www.filmlinc.org

Robert Bresson’s heartbreaking 1966 masterpiece, Au hasard Balthazar, is an unforgettable tale of the life and times of a most unusual yet completely ordinary donkey. As the opening credits roll, we hear writer and pianist Jean-Joël Barbier performing Franz Schubert’s Sonata No. 20, interrupted by the braying of a donkey and concluding with the sound of bells ringing. In a small rural community in France, a donkey has been born. Young Jacques and his sister baptize him and name him Balthazar, after one of the three Magi who presented the infant Jesus with gifts. Jacques and his neighbor, Marie, adore the donkey, treating him not only as their friend but their surrogate child, believing they are destined to marry. But they are torn apart by a land dispute between their fathers, and when they become teenagers, although the upstanding Jacques (Walter Green) still desires Marie (Anne Wiazemsky), she shamefully gives herself to Gérard (François Lafarge), the sinister leader of a local gang of bike-riding juvenile delinquents. Gérard abuses Marie as well as Balthazar, who soon sets off on a journey inspired by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and the Stations of the Cross, going from owner to owner in a series of vignettes that also represent the seven deadly sins. His big, dark eyes appearing to understand what is happening to him, Balthazar encounters lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride but soldiers on, loved by Marie, who becomes ever-more helpless, unable and unwilling to take control of her destiny, much to the disappointment of her parents (Philippe Asselin and Nathalie Joyaut). Her sad fate seems predetermined, as does that of her beloved Balthazar, who literally and figuratively bears the heavy weight of the sins of all around him.

“Everyone who sees this film will be absolutely astonished because this film is really the world in an hour and a half,” Jean-Luc Godard famously said about Au hasard Balthazar, and that gets right to the heart of the film. (Godard went on to cast Wiazemsky in several of his movies; the two were married from 1967 to 1979.) Written and directed by Bresson (Pickpocket, Diary of a Country Priest), beautifully edited by Raymond Lamy, stunningly photographed in black-and-white by Ghislain Cloquet, and featuring primarily nonprofessional actors, Au hasard Balthazar is about young love, sacrifice, honor, family, life and death — and the very essence of humanity, most evidently seen in the form of an amazing animal. The film is rife with biblical overtones, but it is not merely citing dogma, nor is it a direct parable, instead exploring the contradictions inherent in religion. Marie is part Mother Mary, part Mary Magdalene, but mostly just a deeply troubled girl. One night Gérard and his gang beat Balthazar as Marie watches, saying nothing; the next morning, she looks up in church as he sings a Latin hymn that is bookended by the ringing of Balthazar’s bells and the chiming of the church bells.

Metrograph will host week-long fiftieth-anniversary presentation of extraordinary Au hasard Balthazar

The Book of Proverbs explains that “idle hands are the devil’s workshop,” and Bresson expands on this concept by continually focusing on hands. Sitting on a bench in the dark, Marie puts her left hand over her heart, then slowly moves it onto the bench, where another hand emerges from the shadows to gently touch hers. She runs away, but Bresson’s camera still follows her hand as it closes and then opens a door. Later, as Gérard prepares to set Balthazar’s tail on fire, a car passes by, and the camera centers on Gérard’s hands, fidgeting nervously as he worries about being caught. When the drunkard Arnold (Jean-Claude Guilbert) is questioned by the police about a murder, Bresson zooms in on three men’s hands as Arnold gives his papers to the captain (Jacques Sorbets), who gives them to an associate, who then asks for Arnold’s hands so he can take his fingerprints, as if the hands themselves are guilty, stained with sin. “Holding on to me, too?” Arnold says. And when Balthazar performs a trick at a circus, his front hooves become the primary objects of attention. Screening at Lincoln Center on November 25 and 28, Au hasard Balthazar is filled with such glorious moments, layers of meaning attached to every sound and image, a staggering cinematic achievement that amply deserves its status as one of the greatest films ever made.

THE EXILES (Kent Mackenzie, 1961)
Wednesday, November 29, 8:45, and Friday, December 1, 4:45
www.filmlinc.org
www.exilesfilm.com

Having restored Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding, Milestone, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and preservationist Ross Lipman teamed up again to bring back Kent Mackenzie’s black-and-white slice-of-life tale The Exiles, which debuted at the 1961 Venice Film Festival and screened at the inaugural 1964 New York Film Festival before disappearing until its restoration, upon which it was selected for the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival. The Exiles follows a group of American Indians as they hang out on a long Friday night of partying and soul searching in the Bunker Hill section of Los Angeles, centering on Homer (Homer Nish) and Yvonne (Yvonne Williams), who are going to have a baby. After Yvonne makes dinner for Homer and his friends, the men drop her off at the movies by herself while they go out drinking and gambling and, in Tommy’s (Tommy Reynolds) case, looking for some female accompaniment. As the night goes on, Homer, Yvonne, and Tommy share their thoughts and dreams in voice-over monologues that came out of interviews Mackenzie conducted with them. In fact, the cast worked with the director in shaping the story and getting the details right, ensuring its authenticity and realism, giving The Exiles a cinéma vérité feel. Although the film suffers from a poorly synced soundtrack — it is too often too clear that the dialogue was dubbed in later and doesn’t match the movement of the actors’ mouths — it is still an engaging, important independent work (the initial budget was $539) about a subject rarely depicted onscreen with such honesty. Mackenzie, who followed up The Exiles with the documentaries The Teenage Revolution (1965) and Saturday Morning (1971) before his death in 1980 a the age of fifty, avoids sociopolitical remonstrations in favor of a sweet innocence behind which lies the difficulties of the plight of American Indians assimilating into U.S. society. The Exiles is screening November 29 and December 1 at the Francesca Beale Theater.

PICTURES FROM THE REVOLUTION — BERTOLUCCI’S ITALIAN PERIOD

Franco Citti stars as the title character in Pier Paolo Pasolin’s directorial debut, Accatone

ACCATTONE (THE SCROUNGER) (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1961)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Sunday, November 26, 5:50
Series runs November 22-30
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com

After collaborating on a number of works by such auteurs as Mauro Bolognini and Federico Fellini, poet and novelist Pier Paolo Pasolini made his directorial debut in 1961 with the gritty, not-quite-neo-realist Accattone (“scrounger” or “beggar”). Somewhat related to his books Ragazzi di vita and Una vita violenta, the film is set in the Roman borgate, where brash young Vittorio “Accattone” Cataldi (Franco Citti) survives by taking crazy bets — like swimming across a river known for swallowing up people’s lives — and working as a pimp. After a group of local men beat up his main money maker (Silvana Corsini), he meets the more naive Stella (Franca Pasut), whom he starts dating with an eye toward perhaps converting into a prostitute as well. Meanwhile, he tries to establish a relationship with his son, but his estranged wife and her family want nothing to do with him. Filmed in black-and-white by master cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli, Accattone is highlighted by a series of memorable shots, from Accattone’s gorgeous dive from a bridge to a close-up of his face covered in sand, many of which were inspired by Baroque art and set to music by Bach. Written with Sergio Citti and featuring an assistant director named Bernardo Bertolucci — whose father was a friend of Pasolini’s — the story delves into the dire poverty in the slums of Rome, made all the more real by Pasolini’s use of both professional and nonprofessional actors. “Because he did not have much knowledge of film-making, he invented cinema. It was as though I had the privilege of assisting, of witnessing the invention of cinema by Pasolini,” Bertolucci later said of his experience. Accattone is screening November 26 as part of the Quad series “Pictures from the Revolution: Bertolucci’s Italian Period,” which runs November 24-30 and includes such other films that Bertolucci worked on, either as writer or director or in another capacity, as The Grim Reaper, Luna, Partner, 1900, the omnibus Love and Anger, and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.

Jean-Paul Trintignant tries to find his place in the world in Bernardo Bertolucci’s lush masterpiece, The Conformist

THE CONFORMIST (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)
Thursday, November 23, 1:00, 5:45
Saturday, November 25, 7:30
Wednesday, November 29, 9:20
quadcinema.com

Based on the novel by Alberto Moravia, Bernardo Bertolucci’s gorgeous masterpiece, The Conformist, is a political thriller about paranoia, pedophilia, and trying to find one’s place in a changing world. Jean-Louis Trintignant (And God Created Woman, Z, My Night at Maud’s) stars as Marcello Clerici, a troubled man who suffered childhood traumas and is now attempting to join the fascist secret police. To prove his dedication to the movement, he is ordered to assassinate one of his former professors, the radical Luca Quadri (Enzo Tarascio), who is living in France. He falls for Quadri’s much younger wife, Anna (Dominique Sanda), who takes an intriguing liking to Clerici’s wife, Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli), while Manganiello (Gastone Moschin) keeps a close watch on him, making sure he will carry out his assignment. The Conformist, made just after The Spider’s Stragagem and followed by Last Tango in Paris, captures one man’s desperate need to belong, to become a part of Mussolini’s fascist society and feel normal at the expense of his real inner feelings and beliefs. An atheist, he goes to church to confess because Giulia demands it. A bureaucrat, he is not a cold-blooded killer, but he will murder a part of his past in order to be accepted by the fascists (as well as Bertolucci’s own past, as he makes a sly reference to his former mentor, Jean-Luc Godard, by using the French auteur’s phone number and address for Quadri’s). Production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro bathe the film in lush Art Deco colors as Bertolucci moves the story, told in flashbacks, through a series of set pieces that include an erotic dance by Anna and Giulia, a Kafkaesque visit to a government ministry, and a stunning use of black and white and light and shadow as Marcello and Giulia discuss their impending marriage. A multilayered psychological examination of a complex figure living in complex times, as much about the 1930s as the 1970s, as the youth of the Western world sought personal, political, and sexual freedom, The Conformist is screening at the Quad on November 23, 25, and 29.

Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider star in Bernardo Bertolucci’s controversial Last Tango in Paris

LAST TANGO IN PARIS (ULTIMO TANGO A PARIGI) (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972)
Thursday, November 23, 3:15, 8:00
Tuesday, November 28, 9:10
quadcinema.com

One of the most artistic films ever made about seduction, Bernardo Bertolucci’s X-rated Last Tango in Paris is also one of the most controversial. Written by Bertolucci with regular collaborator and editor Franco Arcalli and with French dialogue by Agnès Varda (Le Bonheur, Vagabond), the film opens with credits featuring jazzy romantic music by Argentine saxophonist Gato Barbieri and two colorful and dramatic paintings by Francis Bacon, “Double Portrait of Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach” and “Study for a Portrait,” that set the stage for what is to follow. (Bacon was a major influence on the look and feel of the film, photographed by Vittorio Storaro.) Bertolucci then cuts to a haggard man (Marlon Brando) standing under the Pont de Bir-Hakeim in Paris, screaming out, “Fucking God!” His hair disheveled, he is wearing a long brown jacket and seems to be holding back tears. An adorable young woman (Maria Schneider) in a fashionable fluffy white coat and black hat with flowers passes by, stops and looks at him, then moves on. They meet again inside a large, sparsely furnished apartment at the end of Rue Jules Verne that they are each interested in renting. Both looking for something else in life, they quickly have sex and roll over on the floor, exhausted. For the next three days, they meet in the apartment for heated passion that the man, Paul, insists include nothing of the outside world — no references to names or places, no past, no present, no future; the young woman, Jeanne, agrees. Their sex goes from gentle and touching to brutal and animalistic; in fact, after one session, Bertolucci cuts to actual animals. The film is nothing if not subtle.

Jeanne (Maria Schneider) and Paul (Marlon Brando) share a private, sexual relationship in Last Tango in Paris

The lovers’ real lives are revealed in bits and pieces, as Paul tries to recover from his wife’s suicide and Jeanne deals with a fiancée, Thomas (Jean-Pierre Léaud), who has suddenly decided to make a film about them, without her permission, asking precisely the kind of questions that Paul never wants to talk about. When away from the apartment, Jeanne is shown primarily in the bright outdoors, flitting about fancifully and giving Thomas a hard time; in one of the only scenes in which she’s inside, Thomas makes a point of opening up several doors, preventing her from ever feeling trapped. Meanwhile, Paul is seen mostly in tight, dark spaces, especially right after having a fight with his dead wife’s mother. He walks into his hotel’s dark hallway, the only light coming from two of his neighbors as they open their doors just a bit to spy on him. Not saying anything, he pulls their doors shut as the screen goes from light to dark to light to dark again, and then Bertolucci cuts to Paul and Jeanne’s apartment door as she opens it, ushering in the brightness that always surrounds her. It’s a powerful moment that heightens the difference between the older, less hopeful man and the younger, eager woman. Inevitably, however, the safety of their private, primal relationship is threatened, and tragedy awaits.

Jeanne and Paul develop a complicated sexual relationship in LAST TANGO

Jeanne and Paul develop a complicated sexual relationship in controversial Bertolucci film

“I’ve tried to describe the impact of a film that has made the strongest impression on me in almost twenty years of reviewing. This is a movie people will be arguing about, I think, for as long as there are movies,” Pauline Kael wrote in the New Yorker on October 28, 1972, shortly before Last Tango closed the tenth New York Film Festival. “It is a movie you can’t get out of your system, and I think it will make some people very angry and disgust others. I don’t believe that there’s anyone whose feelings can be totally resolved about the sex scenes and the social attitudes in this film.” More than forty years later, the fetishistic Last Tango in Paris still has the ability to evoke those strong emotions. The sex scenes range from tender, as when Jeanne tells Paul they should try to climax without touching, to when Paul uses butter in an attack that was not scripted and about which Schneider told the Daily Mail in 2007, “I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci. After the scene, Marlon didn’t console me or apologise. Thankfully, there was just one take.” At the time of the shooting, Brando was forty-eight and Schneider nineteen; Last Tango was released between The Godfather and Missouri Breaks, in which Brando starred with Jack Nicholson, while Schneider would go on to make Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger with Nicholson in 1975. Brando died in 2004 at the age of eighty, leaving behind a legacy of more than forty films. Schneider died in 2011 at the age of fifty-eight; she also appeared in more than forty films, but she was never able to escape the associations that followed her after her breakthrough performance in Last Tango, which featured extensive nudity, something she refused to do ever again. Even in 2014, Last Tango in Paris is both sexy and shocking, passionate and provocative, alluring and disturbing, all at the same time, a movie that, as Kael said, viewers won’t easily be able to get out of their system. Last Tango in Paris is screening at the Quad November 23 and 28.

SHAUN IRONS & LAUREN PETTY: WHY WHY ALWAYS

Lemmy Caution (Jim Fletcher) and Natacha Von Braun (Elizabeth Carena) get caught up in mysterious intrigue in Why Why Always (photo by Paula Court)

Abrons Arts Center, Underground Theater
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
Wednesday – Sunday through October 29, $25
212-352-3101
www.abronsartscenter.org
whywhyalways.automaticrelease.org

Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville meets the ASMR phenomenon in Shaun Irons and Lauren Petty’s multimedia futuristic sci-fi noir, Why Why Always, continuing at Abrons Arts Center’s Underground Theater through October 29. The prescient 1965 man vs. machine film starred Eddie Constantine as secret agent Lemmy Caution, who leaves the Outerlands and enters Alphaville posing as reporter Ivan Johnson in order to find out what happened to fellow agent Henry Dickson and to track down mysterious scientist Professor Von Braun. Irons and Petty reimagine the story using multiple monitors and cameras, live feeds and prerecorded scenes, overlapping dialogue, disembodied voices, mirrors and scrims, and more, in black-and-white and color. Longtime New York City Players member Jim Fletcher (Isolde, The Evening) stars as Caution, driving through darkness and moving through Alphaville in his trench coat, gun at the ready. Natacha (Elizabeth Carena), the professor’s daughter, is assigned to accompany him, making sure he doesn’t break any of Alpha 60’s rules, while a pair of seductresses (Laura Bartczak and Marion Spencer) hover around to take care of his more private needs. Wooster Group and Elevator Repair Service veteran Scott Shepherd (who currently can be seen in Measure for Measure at the Public) appears with Madeline Best on video, and Irons and Petty (Keep Your Electric Eye on Me, Standing By: Gatz Backstage) handle the technological aspects and live processing, including going onstage to reposition the cameras as necessary.

Meanwhile, Carena, Bartczak, and Spencer occasionally break out of character and engage in ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response), slow, repetitive movements that have little to do with the plot but create both calm and stimulating atmospheres. Christina Campanella does the narration, with voiceovers by Olivier Conan and Irons, additional music by the Chocolate Factory’s Brian Rogers, costumes and props by Amy Mascena (clothing changes are made at front stage right, visible to some of the audience), complex sound design by Irons and Petty and implemented by Ian Douglas-Moore, and moody lighting courtesy of Jon Harper, referencing Raoul Coutard’s cinematography from the film. The production style of Why Why Always evokes such works as Reid and Sara Farrington’s Casablancabox and Big Dance Theater’s Comme Toujours Here I Stand, tech-heavy, complicated re-creations of Casablanca and Cléo from 5 to 7, respectively. What does it all mean? “That’s always how it is,” Caution says. “You never understand anything. And in the end, it kills you.” It won’t kill you, but it will keep you calmly stimulated and entertained throughout its ninety-minute running time.

FACES PLACES

JR and Agnès Varda have a blast in the masterful Faces and Places

JR and Agnès Varda have a blast with people and animals in the masterful Faces and Places

FACES PLACES (VISAGES VILLAGES) (Agnès Varda & JR, 2017)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
October 6-26
quadcinema.com
cohenmediagroup.tumblr.com

“We’ll have fun making a film,” legendary eighty-eight-year-old Belgian-born French auteur Agnès Varda tells thirty-three-year-old French photographer and street artist JR in Faces Places (Visages Villages), a masterful road movie that may very well be the most fun film you’ll see all year. The unlikely pair first met when Varda, who has made such classics as Cléo from 5 to 7, Vagabond, Jacquot de Nantes, and The Gleaners and I, accepted an invitation from JR, whose practice involves wheat-pasting giant black-and-white photos of men, women, and children on architectural structures, to visit his Paris studio. (JR brought his “Inside Out” art project to Times Square in 2013.) When Varda saw JR’s blow-up of a 1960 self-portrait Varda shot of herself standing in front of a Bellini painting in Venice, the two instantly hit it off and decided to make a film together, heading out in JR’s small photo-booth truck to team up with people in small towns throughout France, including coal miners, dockworkers, farmers, a church-bell ringer, and factory workers. The reactions of the villagers — shrewd, curious, flattered — to JR’s enormous wheat-pasted blow-ups of themselves on their neighborhood walls, barns, abandoned housing, containers, water towers, and other locations are fascinating. “JR is fulfilling my greatest desire. To meet new faces and photograph them, so they don’t fall down the holes of my memory,” Varda, who edited the film with Maxime Pozzi-Garcia, says. Varda and JR make a formidable duo, finding a childlike innocence in their collaboration that is simply captivating to watch.

Cinematic collaboration between Agnès Varda and JR results in stunning visions of humanity

Varda continually tries to get JR to remove his ever-present dark glasses, remembering how her friend and colleague Jean-Luc Godard once let her take pictures of him without glasses, but JR prefers to maintain his mystery, a man who photographs tens of thousands of people’s faces around the world while never fully showing his own. Varda, who relies on the “power of imagination,” even sets up an afternoon with Godard at his home in Switzerland, preparing by having JR roll her furiously through the same Louvre galleries the protagonists run through in Godard’s Band of Outsiders, but of course nothing with Godard ever goes quite as planned. “Chance has always been my best asset,” Varda proclaims in the film, and it is chance, and the willingness to enthusiastically embrace every moment of life, that helps give Faces Places its immeasurable charm. The film, which features a playful score by Matthieu Chedid (‑M-) and was executive produced by Varda’s daughter, Rosalie Varda-Demy, subtly tackles socioeconomic issues but is primarily a marvelous celebration of genuine humanity.

NYFF55: FACES PLACES

JR and Agnès Varda have a blast with people and animals in the masterful Faces and Places

FACES PLACES (VISAGES VILLAGES) (Agnès Varda & JR, 2017)
New York Film Festival, Film Society of Lincoln Center
Sunday, October 1, Alice Tully Hall, $25, 12:30
Monday, October 2, Francesca Beale Theater, $25, 8:30
Festival runs September 28 – October 14
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org
cohenmediagroup.tumblr.com

Cinematic collaboration between Agnès Varda and JR results in stunning visions of humanity

NYFF55: NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL 2017

Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying opens the fifty-fifth New York Film Festival this week

Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, Bruno Walter Auditorium, Alice Tully Hall
West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
September 28 – October 14
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org/nyff2017

The New York Film Festival turns fifty-five this year, with another powerful lineup of shorts, features, documentaries, animation, and more from around the world, with Richard Linklater’s road movie, Last Flag Flying, kicking it all off on September 28. The centerpiece selection is Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck, based on a YA novel by Brian Selznick, with Woody Allen’s Coney Island-set Wonder Wheel closing things out on October 14. Divided into Main Slate, Convergence, Projections, Talks, Retrospectives, Revivals, Shorts, and Spotlight on Documentary, this year’s lineup also features works by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Arnaud Desplechin, Agnès Varda and JR, Greta Gerwig, Claire Denis, Noah Baumbach, Aki Kaurismäki, Agnieszka Holland, Claude Lanzmann, Rebecca Miller, Griffin Dunne, Abel Ferrara, and Hong Sang-soo, most of whom will be on hand for Q&As following select screenings. There’s also a twenty-four-film salute to Robert Mitchum celebrating the centennial of his birth; revivals of works by Jean Vigo, Jean-Luc Godard, Hou Hsiao-hsien, James Whale, Philippe Garrel, Jean Renoir, Jean-Pierre Melville, and others; experimental films by Xu Bing, Luke Fowler, Kevin Jerome Everson, Barbara Hammer, and more; immersive and interactive experiences; and panel discussions and dialogues. Below is a list of at least one highlight per day for which tickets are still available or the event is free; keep checking twi-ny for reviews and further information.

Thursday, September 28
Last Flag Flying (Richard Linklater, 2017), introduced by Richard Linklater, Bryan Cranston, Laurence Fishburne, J. Quinton Johnson, and Darryl Ponicsan, Alice Tully Hall, $100, 6:00

Friday, September 29
Convergence, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, free, 3:00 – 6:00 (also 9/30 and 10/1, 12 noon – 6:00)

Saturday, September 30
On Cinema: With Richard Linklater, moderated by Kent Jones, Walter Reade Theater, $25, 6:00

Spoor (Agnieszka Holland, in cooperation with Kasia Adamik, 2017), followed by a Q&A with Agnieszka Holland and Kasia Adamik, Alice Tully Hall, $25, 9:00

Sunday, October 1
HBO Directors Dialogues: Lucrecia Martel, Howard Gilman Theater, free, 3:00

Film Comment Live: The Cinema of Experience, amphitheater, free, 7:00

Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel closes the fifty-fifth New York Film Festival

Monday, October 2
HBO Directors Dialogues: Agnès Varda & JR, Francesca Beale Theater, free, 6:00

Zama (Lucrecia Martel, 2017), followed by a Q&A with Lucrecia Martel, Alice Tully Hall, $25, 6:00

Tuesday, October 3
L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934), Howard Gilman Theater, $15, 3:45

Wednesday, October 4
Film Comment Presents: A Gentle Creature (Sergei Loznitsa, 2017), Walter Reade Theater, $25, 6:00

Thursday, October 5
A Story from Chikamatsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954), Francesca Beale Theater, $15, 3:30

Friday, October 6
Spielberg (Susan Lacy, 2017), introduced by Jessica Levin and Emma Pildes, Walter Reade Theater, $25, 8:45

Saturday, October 7
Claude Lanzmann’s Four Sisters: The Hippocratic Oath (Claude Lanzmann, 2017), introduced by Claude Lanzmann, Alice Tully Hall, $25, 1:00

Good Luck (Ben Russell, 2017), followed by a Q&A with Ben Russell, Francesca Beale Theater, $15, 6:15

Sunday, October 8
Projections Program 5: Urban Rhapsodies, followed by a Q&A with Ayo Akingbade, Fern Silva, Ephraim Asili, and Michael Robinson, Francesca Beale Theater, $15, 12 noon

Let the Sun Shine In (Claire Denis, 2017), followed by a Q&A with Claire Denis, Alice Tully Hall, $25, 3:30

Monday, October 9
HBO Directors Dialogues: Hong Sang-soo, amphitheater, free, 7:00

Tuesday, October 10
HBO Directors Dialogues: Philippe Garrel, amphitheater, free, 8:00

Wednesday, October 11
Master Class: Vittorio Storaro and Ed Lachman, moderated by Kent Jones, Walter Reade Theater, $25, 6:15

Thursday, October 12
Hallelujah the Hills (Adolfas Mekas, 1963), introduced by Jonas Mekas, Howard Gilman Theater, $15, 6:00

Lucía (Humberto Solás 1968), Howard Gilman Theater, $15, 8:00

Friday, October 13
Ismael’s Ghosts (Arnaud Desplechin, 2017), Director’s Cut, followed by a Q&A with Arnaud Desplechin, Alice Tully Hall, $25, 6:00

Saturday, October 14
Farewell, My Lovely (Dick Richards, 1975), introduced by Robert Mitchum’s daughter, Petrine Mitchum, Howard Gilman Theater, $15, 1:30

PLUS ÇA CHANGE: FRENCH NEW WAVE IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM

Good luck figuring out what Godard’s Film Socialisme is about

FILM SOCIALISME (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Friday, September 8, 7:00 & 9:30
Series runs September 8-17
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

In the late 1950s and 1960s, the French New Wave exploded around the world, redefining cinema through independent production and the auteur theory, led by such innovative directors as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer, Alain Resnais, and Jacques Rivette. Fifty years later, several of these filmmakers were still creating outstanding motion pictures, as evidenced by the BAMcinématek series “Plus ça change: French New Wave in the New Millennium,” running September 8-17. The twelve-film festival kicks off September 8 with Godard’s highly contentious and polemical Film Socialisme, his first work to be made fully in high-definition digital video. After watching the 2010 film, I was not quite sure what I had just witnessed. There was beautiful imagery shot by Fabrice Aragno and Paul Grivas, pretentious and funny literary dialogue and narration taken from such writers as Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Walter Benjamin, appearances by punk icons Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye, and archival footage from old movies, divided into three sections: The first (“Such Things”) takes place on a cruise ship (that capsized a few years later), the second (“Our Europe”) at a gas station, and the third (“Our Humanities”) a trip through the Mediterranean, with stops at Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Hellas, Naples, and Barcelona. There’s bullfighting, Stalin, Hitler, soccer, a llama, war, cats on the internet, and a girl reading Balzac’s Lost Illusions. There’s also anti-Semitism, with parts of the film inspired by Léon Daudet’s Le Voyage de Shakespeare and Godard using the name Palestine instead of Israel. In doing research on Film Socialisme to try to find out what I had seen — not usually a good sign for a movie — I found lavish five-star reviews, angry one-star condemnations, and a series of fascinating essays by Richard Brody in the New Yorker discussing, among other things, Stalin looting the Spanish treasury, Godard’s fondness for tennis, and the strange story of Willi Münzenberg. And of course, there are statements about life and cinema, truth and fiction. “You see, with the verb ‘to be,’ the lack of reality becomes flagrant,” one character says. “Liberty is expensive. But one can’t buy her with gold, and not with blood but with cowardice, prostitution, and betrayal,” another says. Film Socialisme comes to an abrupt end as the words “No Comment” take over the screen in a stark, bold sans serif font. ’Nuf said.

In addition to the below films, the series includes Resnais’s You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet and Wild Grass, Chabrol’s The Girl Cut in Two, Varda’s The Gleaners & I, Rohmer’s The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, and Rivette’s The Duchess of Langeais.

Jeanne Balibar is extraordinary in Jacques Rivette masterpiece

VA SAVOIR (WHO KNOWS?) (Jacques Rivette, 2001)
Saturday, September 9, 2:00, 6:30
www.bam.org

Jacques Rivette’s Va Savoir is a long, talky French movie about very beautiful, very complicated, sex-crazed men and women — and it just might be the master filmmaker’s crowning glory, a magnificent masterpiece that deserved its slot as the New York Film Festival’s opening night selection back in 2001. This erotically charged, very funny drama is set around a traveling theater company’s return to Paris to put on Pirandello’s As You Desire Me in the original Italian. Ugo (Sergio Castellitto), the director and costar of the play, is romantically involved with Camille (Jeanne Balibar), the lead actress, who visits her former lover Pierre (Jacques Bonnaffé), a philosopher with a thing for Heidegger, who is now living with Sonia (Marianne Basler), a dance instructor who is being chased by Arthur (Bruno Todeschini), a ne’er-do-well whose half sister, Do (Hélène de Fougerolles), has taken a liking to Ugo and offers to help him find an unpublished ghost play by Carlo Goldini, which her mother (Catherine Rouvel) just might have. Every minute of this film is pure magic, and at the center of it all is the fantastique Camille, an instinctual, graceful actress whom everyone — men and women — fall in love with, played by the fantastique, instinctual, graceful Balibar, whom audiences will fall in love with as well. French film enthusiasts should watch for Claude Berri in a small role. Lovingly photographed by William Lubtchansky and edited by his wife, Nicole Lubtchansky, Va Savoir is screening at 2:00 and 6:30 on September 9 in the BAMcinématek series “Plus ça change: French New Wave in the New Millennium.”

Chris Marker goes in search of smiling felines in The Case of the Grinning Cat

THE CASE OF THE GRINNING CAT (Chris Marker, 2006)
Sunday, September 10, 2:00, 5:15, 8:30
www.bam.org

Legendary cat lover and filmmaker Chris Marker (La Jetée, Sans Soleil) goes on a search for a friendly feline in the slight, playful hour-long documentary The Case of the Grinning Cat. In post-9/11 Paris, when much of the world was proclaiming “We are all Americans,” Marker discovered a series of stenciled yellow cats showing up in odd places, from the sides of buildings to internet sites to classical works of art. After disappearing for a short time — causing Marker great frustration — they return as placards and masks at protest movements against U.S. imperialism and other causes. Although the film is fun to watch, it never quite connects all the dots. The Case of the Grinning Cat is screening at 2:00, 5:15, and 8:30 on September 10 in the BAMcinématek series “Plus ça change: French New Wave in the New Millennium.”

Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language speaks for itself

GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE (ADIEU AU LANGAGE) (Jean-Luc Godard, 2014)
Saturday, September 16, 2:00, 4:30, 7:00, 9:30
www.bam.org
www.kinolorber.com

After the New York Film Festival advance press screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s 3D Goodbye to Language in 2014, a colleague turned to me and said, “If this was Godard’s first film, he would never have had a career.” While I don’t know whether that might be true, I do know that Goodbye to Language is the 3D flick Godard was born to make, a 3D movie that couldn’t have come from anyone else. What’s it about? I have no idea. Well, that’s not exactly right. It’s about everything, and it’s about nothing. It’s about the art of filmmaking. It’s about the authority of the state and freedom. It’s about extramarital affairs. It’s about seventy minutes long. It’s about communication in the digital age. (Surprise! Godard does not appear to be a fan of the cell phone and Yahoo!) And it’s about a cute dog (which happens to be his own mutt, Miéville, named after his longtime partner, Anne-Marie Miéville). In the purposefully abstruse press notes, Godard, eighty-three at the time, describes it thusly: “the idea is simple / a married woman and a single man meet / they love, they argue, fists fly / a dog strays between town and country / the seasons pass / the man and woman meet again / the dog finds itself between them / the other is in one / the one is in the other / and they are three / the former husband shatters everything / a second film begins / the same as the first / and yet not / from the human race we pass to metaphor / this ends in barking / and a baby’s cries.” Yes, it’s all as simple as that. Or maybe not.

Jean-Luc Godard has fun with 3D in Goodbye to Language

Godard divides the film into sections labeled “La Nature” and “La Métaphore,” cutting between several ongoing narratives, from people reading Dostoyevsky, Pound, and Solzhenitsyn at an outdoor café to an often naked man and woman in a kitchen to clips of such old movies as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Snows of Kilimanjaro to Lord Byron and the Shelleys on Lake Geneva. Did I say “narrative”? It’s not really a narrative but instead storytelling as only Godard can do it, and this time in 3D, with the help of cinematographer Fabrice Aragno. Godard has a blast with the medium, which he previously used in a pair of recent shorts. He has fun — and so do we — as he toys with the name of the film and the idea of saying farewell (he plays with the French title, Adieu au langage, forming such puns as “Ah, dieu” and “Ah, dieux,” making the most of 3D layering); creates superimpositions and fast-moving shots that blur the image, making the glasses worthless; changes from sharp color to black-and-white to wild pastel-like bursts of red, blue, and green; evokes various genres, with mystery men in suits and gunshots that might or might not involve kidnapping and murder; and even gets a kick out of where he places the subtitles. These games are very funny, as is the voiceover narration, which includes philosophy from such diverse sources as Jacques Ellul (his essay “The Victory of Hitler”) and Claude Monet (“Paint not what we see, for we see nothing, but paint that we don’t see”). And for those who, like my colleague, believe the film to be crap, Godard even shows the man sitting on the bowl, his girlfriend in the bathroom with him, directly referencing Rodin’s The Thinker and talking about “poop” as he noisily evacuates his bowels. So, in the end, what is Godard saying farewell to? Might this be his last film? Is he saying goodbye to the old ways we communicated? Is he bidding adieu to humanity, leaving the future for the dogs, the trees, and the ocean? Does it matter? A hit at Cannes, Goodbye to Language is screening September 16 at 2:00, 4:30, 7:00, and 9:30 in the BAMcinématek series “Plus ça change: French New Wave in the New Millennium.” You can check out the NSFW French trailer here.

Agnès Varda takes an unusual approach to autobiography in THE BEACHES OF AGNES

THE BEACHES OF AGNÈS (LES PLAGES D’AGNÈS) (Agnès Varda, 2008)
Sunday, September 17, 2:00
www.bam.org

“The whole idea of fragmentation appeals to me,” filmmaker, photographer, and installation artist Agnès Varda says in the middle of her unusual cinematic autobiography, the César-winning documentary The Beaches of Agnès. “It corresponds so naturally to questions of memory. Is it possible to reconstitute this personality, this person Jean Vilar, who was so exceptional?” She might have been referring to her friend, the French actor and theater director, but the exceptional Belgian-French Varda might as well have been referring to herself. Later she explains, “My memories swarm around me like confused flies. I hesitate to remember all that. I don’t want to.” Fortunately for viewers, Varda (Jacquot de Nantes, The Gleaners & I) does delve into her past in the film, sharing choice tidbits from throughout her life and career, in creative and offbeat ways that are charmingly self-effacing. Using cleverly arranged film clips, re-creations, photographs, and an array of frames and mirrors, the eighty-year-old Varda discusses such colleagues as Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, and Alain Resnais; shares personal details of her long relationship with Jacques Demy; visits her childhood home; rebuilds an old film set; speaks with her daughter, Rosalie Varda, and son, Mathieu Demy; talks about several of her classic films, including La Pointe Courte, Cléo from 5 to 7, and Vagabond; and, in her ever-present bangs, walks barefoot along beaches, fully aware that the camera is following her every move and reveling in it while also feigning occasional shyness. Filmmakers don’t generally write and direct documentaries about themselves, but unsurprisingly, the Nouvelle Vague legend and first woman to win an honorary Palme d’or makes The Beaches of Agnès about as artistic as it can get without becoming pretentious and laudatory. The film is screening September 17 at 2:00 in the BAMcinématek series “Plus ça change: French New Wave in the New Millennium.”