Yearly Archives: 2011

VOYAGER: THE FILMS OF PETER WEIR

Peter Weir will be at Lincoln Center to talk about his latest work, THE WAY BACK, as well as his vaunted, varied career

Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
January 6-9, $12 per film, three-film pass $27
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

Australian New Wave auteur Peter Weir has compiled quite a diverse resume since his 1974 debut, THE CARS THAT ATE PARIS, directing such well-regarded films as the creepy PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK (1975), the mysterious THE LAST WAVE (1977), the heartbreaking GALLIPOLI (1981), the action-packed THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY (1982), and the thrilling WITNESS (1985). He’s been a little more hit and miss since then, having helmed such fare as THE MOSQUITO COAST (1986), DEAD POETS SOCIETY (1989), GREEN CARD (1990), FEARLESS (1993), THE TRUMAN SHOW (1998), and MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD (2003). But after seven years, he has found his way back with THE WAY BACK, a WWII prison escape drama starring Colin Farrell and Ed Harris. In celebration of his latest work, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is honoring Weir with a ten-film salute January 6-9 that includes most of the above pictures (as well as his 1979 made-for-television academic-class satire THE PLUMBER). Rosie Perez will be on hand for the January 9 (8:30) screening of FEARLESS, while Weir himself will be at the Walter Reade Theater for a Q&A following the January 7 (6:00) sneak peek of THE WAY BACK. In addition, Weir, who has been nominated for one Best Picture, one Best Writing, and four Best Director Oscars (with no wins), will sit down with Scott Foundas on January 8 at 6:00 for An Evening with Peter Weir, talking about his life and career in Australia, Hollywood, and many of the far-off locations he’s used in his work.

THE BUDDHA IMAGE: OUT OF UDDIYANA

“Large Seated Bodhisattva in Meditation,” Gandhara culture in Pakistan or Afghanistan, grey schist stone, circa ninth century (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Tibet House US
22 West 15th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Extended through January 7, free, 12 noon – 5:00 pm
212-807-0563
www.tibethouse.us

Originally scheduled to end October 20 and then November 16, Tibet House’s revelatory five-part exhibition, “The Buddha Image: Out of Uddiyana,” has been extended yet again through January 7, and you should do whatever it takes to make sure you see it before it closes. Investigating the origin of the Buddha image, which some believe began in the Uddiyana (“royal garden”) kingdom of Northern Pakistan, the show includes dozens of remarkable artifacts divided into five sections: Gandharan Stone Sculptures, Stupas and Reliquaries, Gandharan and Swat Metal Buddhas, Pilgrimage, and Silk Road. Accumulated by Nik Douglas for the Buckingham Collection over the course of some forty-four years, the objects date back back more than nineteen centuries. Walking through the many treasures, you’ll wonder why they’re not part of a permanent museum collection. Among the most unusual of the sculptures are bronze and stone depictions of bodhisattvas with mustaches, in addition to fasting, emaciated buddhas, nearly skeletal as they continue to meditate. Glass cases display rock crystal stupas with gold/electrum alloy from the first and second century, while others contain Chinese gilt bronze buddhas from the sixth century. You can almost feel the electricity emanating from several works that depict a buddha and his consort staring deep into each other’s eyes, including the many-armed “Large Chakrasamvara Yabyum (‘Wheel of Becoming’)” and “Large Amitayus Yabyum (‘Buddha of Boundless Life’).” The early-nineteenth-century Sino-Tibetan “Huge Figure of the Kurukulla Dakini” features a central figure surrounded by fire, wearing a necklace of shrunken heads, standing on a woman. One of the most spectacular pieces can be found just to the left of the entrance, nearly hidden away in its own alcove: “Large and Complete Yamantara (‘Remover of the Fear of Death’),” a bull-headed, multi-armed, many-faced bodhisattva surrounded by mysterious, exciting iconography. In his foreword to the exhibition catalog, Tibet House president Robert Thurman writes, “We hope that the manifestations gathered in the exhibition will find their way here and there to continue to inspire individuals to use their precious human lives in the evolutionarily most meaningful way to create real human values in themselves and others.” We feel exactly the same way.

POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE 2011

The walls of the CRG Gallery in Chelsea will be filled with affordable postcard art this weekend to benefit Visual AIDS

A BENEFIT FOR VISUAL AIDS
CRG Gallery
548 West 22nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
January 7 preview party: $85 (includes one raffle ticket), 6:00 – 8:00
January 8-9, suggested admission $5
www.thebody.com

The annual Postcards from the Edge benefit for Visual AIDS, the nonprofit organization that uses the arts to continue to fight the disease, is like finding one more present under the tree after the holidays have seemingly come and gone. Now in its thirteenth year, Postcards from the Edge features original postcard-size works of art from more than fifteen hundred established and emerging artists, each one available for only eighty-five dollars. However, you initially will have no idea whether you’ve acquired a one-of-a-kind piece from a famous international art star or an up-and-coming newbie, since attendees can only see the front of the postcard, not the back (until you buy it), where it is signed by the artist. It’s really the purest way to purchase art, selecting something you like instead of just looking for a famous name who might be worth much more than you paid. But the famous names are plenty: Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Wil Barnet, Ross Bleckner, Lesley Dill, Alfredo Jaar, Jeff Koons, Christian Marclay, Marilyn Minter, Yoko Ono, Tom Otterness, Mickalene Thomas, Bill Viola, John Waters, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner, and so many more. Of course, at a mere eighty-five bucks, you can’t go wrong no matter whose work you pick out. And as a bonus, if you buy four on Saturday (10:00 am- 6:00 pm), you get a fifth free, while on Sunday (12 noon – 4:00), with the choices dwindling down, you get a third free with the purchase of two. On Friday night there is a two-hour preview cocktail party at which you get an advance look at what’s on the wall but cannot actually buy anything yet; each attendee gets a raffle ticket to see who will select the first postcard, and the top ten bidders at the silent auction of small pieces by Larissa Bates, Nicole Eisenman, Harmony Hammond, David Humphrey, and Marc Swanson will get the next ten spots. In addition, you’ll get to mingle with other collectors, gallerists, many of the artists, and such celebrity guests as Alan Cumming, Trisha Brown, Tony Feher, John Kelly, Burt Barr, Slava Mogutin, Brian Kenny, and Richard Renaldi.

CULTUREMART ’11

Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya's FLOATING POINT WAVES is part of HERE's annual Culturemart festival

HERE Arts Center
145 Sixth Ave. at Dominick St.
January 7-23, $15
212-647-0202
www.here.org

Culturemart, the annual festival of workshop productions by HERE’s resident artists, is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year with another slate of diverse experimental shows incorporating theater, dance, film, music, and audience interaction. Things get under way January 7-8 with Laura Peterson’s GROUND, the second part of her Wooden trilogy, in which a dance quartet performs within living grass and trees. Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya, artistic directors of the New York Butoh Festival, will present the immersive, multimedia FLOATING POINT WAVES. Betty Shamieh makes the murdered Arab from Albert Camus’s THE STRANGER the main character in the mysterious THE STRANGEST. A community of artists — as well as the audience — are all part of the interactive LUSH VALLEY, which seeks to reclaim the American dream. THE VENUS RIFF riffs on the Venus Hottentot. Democracy takes center stage in Aaron Landsman’s participatory CITY COUNCIL MEETING. Deborah Stein and Suli Holum investigate a woman who is her own twin in CHIMERA. Kamala Sankaram’s chamber opera MIRANDA mixes reality television with hip-hop and Hindustani classical music. And Lindsay Abromaitis-Smith uses puppetry to look at the sacred in EPYLLION, among other shows running through January 23, with all tickets a mere $15.

DR. MABUSE, DER SPIELER (DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER)

DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER is an epic document of its time

WEIMAR CINEMA, 1919-1933: DAYDREAMS AND NIGHTMARES
DR. MABUSE, DER SPIELER (DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER) (Fritz Lang, 1922)
MoMA Film
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Monday, January 3, 7:30
Saturday, January 8, 7:00
Tickets: $10, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

Fritz Lang’s 1922 expressionist epic, DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER, is one of the most thrilling crime dramas ever made. Written by Lang and his wife, Thea von Harbou, based on the popular novel by Norbert Jacques, the film focuses on the title character (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), a criminal mastermind who is a sort of Nietzschean superman able to control his victims using hypnosis and psychoanalysis. Putting his evil gaze on such easy prey as the wealthy Edgar Hull (Paul Richter) and Count Told (Alfred Abel), Mabuse tries to ruin them through a series of card games he manipulates, with the help of nightclub singer Cara Carozza (Aud Egede-Nissen) and a motley crew of assistants that includes Spoerri (Robert Forster-Larrinaga), Georg (Hans Adalbert Schlettow), Hawasch (Charles Puffy), and Pesch (Georg John). Meanwhile, steadfast prosecutor Norbert von Wenk (Bernhard Goetzke) is on the case, attempting to track down and capture the mystery man who is leaving a trail of death and destruction behind him. Divided into two sections, “The Great Gambler, a Picture of Our Time” and “Inferno — A Play of People in Our Time,” DR. MABUSE is indeed a story of its time, a document of the state of mind of the German populace between the two world wars. Mabuse, representing both chaos and tyranny, is a master of disguise, portraying numerous middle-class figures fighting against the upper class and authority. The film is not only about one evil man’s grab for power but the power of cinema itself; just as Mabuse can change characters within the film, all of the characters are merely actors in costume, performing a fiction on stunning sets created by production designer Karl Vollbrecht and photographed by cinematographer Carl Hoffmann. In fact, at one point Mabuse stares directly into the camera, his face hurtling toward the viewer, attempting a kind of mass hypnosis that, presciently, can be said to predict the rise of Nazism in Germany. But most of all, DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER, which was followed by THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE in 1933 and THE THOUSAND EYES OF DR. MABUSE in 1960, is a film about fear — fear of the unknown, fear of technology, fear of psychoanalysis, and fear of what the future holds. The film is screening as part of MoMA’s Weimar Cinema, 1919–1933: Daydreams and Nightmares series, comprising eighty-one films made between World War I and World War II; upcoming screenings include G. W. Pabst’s PANDORA’S BOX, Richard Eichberg’s THE MASKED MANNEQUIN, Wilhelm (William) Dieterle’s SEX IN CHAINS / SEX IN FETTERS, Walther Ruttmann’s IN DER NACHT and MELODY OF THE WORLD, Ernst Lubitsch’s MADAME DUBARRY (PASSION) and THE OYSTER PRINCESS, and Slatan Dudow’s WHITHER GERMANY?

THE ROCK & ROLL CIRCUS

Under the Big Apple Circus Tent
Damrosch Park, Lincoln Center Plaza
Monday, January 3, free, 7:00
Tuesday, January 4, mezzanine $25, ringside $30, 7:00
www.rockandrollcircusparty.com

On December 11, 1968, the Rolling Stones hosted the Rock and Roll Circus, an unpredictable mix of music and mayhem with the Who, Marianne Faithfull, Jethro Tull, Taj Mahal, clowns, a fire eater, a flying trapeze act, and the one-night-only supergroup the Dirty Mac, consisting of John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Eric Clapton, Mitch Mitchell, and Keith Richards. Vance Garrett Productions, Jessica Resler of Muffin Cupcake, and visual artist Adarsha Benjamin are trying to recapture some of that old magic with a new three-ring extravaganza of music and acrobatics they are also calling the Rock and Roll Circus. On January 3 at 8:00, Japanther, the Pharmacy, Voxhaul Broadcast, the So So Glos, and Electric Tickle Machine will team up for a free concert under the Big Apple Circus tent in Damrosch Park, while Ariel Pink, Amazing Baby, Aska + Nick Zinner, and Saint Motel will be part of a ticketed show ($50) January 4 that will also include acrobats, contortionists, jugglers, balancing acts, and other performers from the Big Apple Circus, led by ringmaster Acid Betty, the Fiercest Hybrid Drag Queen in New York City. (OK GO were initially scheduled to headline Tuesday night but have been replaced by Ariel Pink, whose HAUNTED GRAFFITI disc has made many year-end top-ten lists.) Both nights will feature local food trucks, various specialized pop-up shops, sponsored bars, and other booths. While it might not quite be the Stones, the Who, and other musical legends, this Rock and Roll Circus 2.0 is a cool collection of hot indie bands worth checking out. The Big Apple Circus, comprising an international roster of acts from the United States, Bulgaria, China, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mongolia, and Russia, continues at Lincoln Center through January 9 before heading to Boston April 2 – May 15 and then coming to Queens May 21 – June 12.

JOHN BALDESSARI: PURE BEAUTY

John Baldessari, “The Duress Series: Person Climbing Exterior Wall of Tall Building / Person on Ledge of Tall Building / Person on Girders of Unfinished Tall Building,” digital prints with acrylic on Sintra, 2003 (Ringier Collection, Switzerland / © John Baldessari)

Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall, second floor
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 9 (open Monday, September 6)
Recommended admission: $20 adults, children under twelve free
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org

California-based artist and teacher John Baldessari helped put the capital “C” in Conceptual art. For more than half a century, the seventy-nine-year-old Baldessari has been creating a fascinating mélange of visual and text-based imagery, a vaunting vocabulary all his own incorporating paintings, found objects, photographs, videos, and an anarchistic philosophy into collages and installations that examine popular culture, sociopolitical ideology, and the making and perception of art itself. “Pure Beauty,” on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through January 9, is an engaging retrospective of more than one hundred works from throughout Baldessari’s continually evolving career. “Cremation Project” houses the ashes from early paintings that he purposely destroyed in a mortuary. In the short film “I Am Making Art,” Baldessari repeats the title over and over as he rearranges himself in different positions, while in “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art” he writes the title statement again and again, and the exhibition supports both declarations. He appropriates images from the news and Hollywood and adds unique touches in such pieces as “Violent Space Series: Two Stares Making a Point but Blocked by a Plane (for Malevich),” “Heel,” and “The Duress Series: Person Climbing Exterior Wall of Tall Building / Person on Ledge of Tall Building / Person on Girders of Unfinished Tall Building.” In such works as “Kiss/Panic,” “Man and Woman with Bridge,” and “Pelicans Staring at Woman with Nose Bleeding,” Baldessari juxtaposes images from different sources, resulting in brand-new noirish narratives filled with Hitchcockian delight. He often adds color elements to black-and-white photographs and collages, as in “The Overlap Series: Jogger (with Cosmic Event),” while color becomes the primary subject in such works as “Six Colorful Inside Jobs” and “Prima Facie (Fifth State): Warm Brownie / American Cheese / Carrot Stick / Black Bean Soup / Perky Peach / Leek.” Even when Baldessari comes off as simply cheesy or silly, as in a series of framed pictures intentionally hung unevenly, it’s still fun to look at. “Artists are better at finding a way to kill their time,” Baldessari once said. There are a lot worse ways to kill some time by immersing yourself in this beguiling survey at the Met.