Yearly Archives: 2012

GERTRUDE’S PARIS FESTIVAL

Symphony Space will celebrate American ex-pat Gertrude Stein and Paris with springtime festival

Symphony Space
2537 Broadway at 95th St.
April 1 – May 5, free – $95
212-864-5400
www.symphonyspace.org

“America is my country and Paris is my hometown,” Gertrude Stein famously said about the City of Lights. Symphony Space is celebrating the Lost Generation writer’s longtime love affair with the romantic French city with five weeks of special programming, including film screenings, jazz concerts, literary discussions, wine tastings, and dancing. Held in conjunction with the Met’s current exhibit “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde” (running through June 3), “Gertrude’s Paris” begins on April 1 with Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris, a free reception for the “My Paris!” and “La Revue Nègre” photo exhibitions, a free jazz cabaret with the Nick Finzer Trio, and Perry Miller Adato’s documentary Paris: The Luminous Years. The festival continues with such events as “Wearing the Lost Generation: A Musical/Sartorial Salon” on April 5, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso on April 8, “Great Taste! Red Wines of France” on April 10, “Tin Hat Takes on E. E. Cummings” on April 13, Arne Glimcher’s Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies on April 22, “Josephine Baker/Archival Footage” on April 29, and the free, all-day “Wall to Wall: Gertrude’s Paris” party on May 5. The series also offers a great chance to catch up on the work of Jean Renoir, with Sunday screenings of Beauty and the Beast (April 8), Boudu Saved from Drowning (April 15), and The Rules of the Game (April 22).

JOSEPHINE MECKSEPER: MANHATTAN OIL PROJECT

Josephine Meckseper’s oil rigs drill, baby, drill in the Theater District (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Eighth Ave. at West 46th St.
Through May 6, free
artproductionfund.org
manhattan oil project slideshow

Born in Germany and based in New York City for many years, multimedia artist Josephine Meckseper examines consumer culture in her painting, photography, sculpture, video, and installation. Last year she turned the ninth floor of Chelsea’s FLAG Art Foundation into a kind of glitzy, high-end department store. Now she has installed two of her giant oil rigs on a vacant lot at the corner of Eighth Ave. and 46th St., where they apparently drill for buried treasure. The pair of red-and-black steel oil pumpjacks, which reach twenty-five feet high and weigh three tons each, have been placed within the caged-in area known as the Last Lot, a site the Art Production Fund and Times Square Alliance are using for public art projects in conjunction with owners the Shubert Organization. Inspired by abandoned old rigs Meckseper encountered in Electra, Texas, “Manhattan Oil Project” references politics and the state of the U.S. economy as it drills, baby, drills in the Theater District, an area where men, women, and children have been coming for more than a hundred years to be entertained as well as to strike it rich. As families lose their houses to the mortgage crisis as well as an increasing stream of natural disasters, there is more displacement than ever before across America, as well as an ever-widening gap between the wealthy and the poor, the one percent and the ninety-nine percent; Meckseper’s installation evokes this dichotomy while calling into question environmental concerns and, of course, the impossibility of it all, as no one is likely to find oil under Eighth Ave. Then again, miracles have been known to happen; shortly after “Manhattan Oil Project” was installed, a billboard for Jesus Christ Superstar rose over the lot, providing yet another angle through which to view the work.

TWI-NY TALK: LEELA CORMAN

Tuesday, April 3, WORD, 126 Franklin St., free (advance RSVP requested), 718-383-0096, 7:00
Thursday, April 5, Tenement Museum, 103 Orchard St., free (advance RSVP requested), 212-982-8420, 6:30
Saturday, April 28, and Sunday, April 29, MoCCA Festival, 69th Regiment Armory, 68 Lexington Ave., times TBA

Illustrator and cartoonist Leela Corman makes her graphic novel debut with Unterzakhn (Schocken, April 3, $24.95), a dramatic tale of twin sisters coming-of-age on the Lower East Side in the early twentieth century. Young Esther Feinberg gets a job working for a burly woman who operates a burlesque theater and a brothel, while Fanya starts helping out an elegant female obstetrician who also performs illegal abortions. The gripping family drama takes on an added poignancy knowing that Corman and her husband, cartoonist Tom Hart (How to Say Everything), recently suffered a horrific tragic loss, shortly after moving from New York City to Gainesville, Florida. (Hart writes about it here.) Corman will be at WORD in Brooklyn on April 3 for the official launch of Unterzakhn, and she will follow that up with a Tenement Talk at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum on April 5. She will also be signing copies of the book at the MoCCA Festival, taking place April 28-29 at the 69th Regiment Armory. We recently discussed graphic novels, a woman’s right to choose, and belly dancing with Corman.

twi-ny: Unterzakhn is reminiscent of such other graphic novels as Persepolis and Fun Home, yet while both of those were deeply personal memoirs, your book is fiction (but feels like a family memoir). Are there personal memories that can be found in Unterzakhn that you’re willing to share here? Or are the stories and characters a complete fiction?

Leela Corman: The books you mention are works of urgent personal and historical memoir. They are in a different genre. I’m a fiction writer. I think it does fictional comics a disservice to constantly refer back to autobiography, and I wonder why people always seem to expect comics to be autobiographical now. I don’t think it’s a good thing, though I love both books you mentioned, so this is not to take away from those works. Fictional storytelling pulls from all areas of a writer’s life, including (and especially) the imagination. No, there are no significant, specific personal memories in Unterzakhn. Some characters are inspired by people I’ve known, but that would be about 5-10% “real person” and 90-95% fictional character — or more. There’s an alchemical process when creating fiction. Memoir is a different art form, with its own processes. I’m worried that serious fiction in comics is being undervalued, and that anything autobiographical is getting attention, whether it’s interesting or not.

As I said above, I’m not sure that the focus on autobiography is always such a good thing for comics. There are a few places where it works well: 1) When learning to write and draw comics; this would be student work, and is not always for public consumption. 2) When someone REALLY has something to say, and can tie their personal experience to something important happening in the world — Fun Home, MAUS, Persepolis. 3) When someone can turn their personal observations into something interesting for the rest of us, and can avoid solipsism. Great examples of this are Vanessa Davis, who is hilarious and universal, and John Porcellino, who is a poet of observation. 4) If you’re Lynda Barry. She can do anything.

Belly dancer and cartoonist Leela Corman returns to her native New York to talk about her new book, UNTERZAKHN

twi-ny: Unterzakhn comes along at a critical moment in American society, when abortion clinics and organizations such as Planned Parenthood are coming under more fire than ever in the political arena. Did that specifically influence the creation of the book? How do you feel about what’s going on in the country regarding a woman’s right to choose what to do with her body?

Leela Corman: I initially started this project in 2003, and that was my explicit goal, to explore the consequences of not having a choice. If you are a woman in this society, these rights have always been threatened, and this conflict has always been hot. There’s very little difference to me between the discourse in 2012, and the discourse in the ’80s and ’90s, when I was growing up. I’ll wager that every woman my age has older relatives who had to have illegal abortions, unwanted pregnancies, or both. There is absolutely NO excuse for anyone in the public sphere, especially men, to have any say whatsoever in what women do with their bodies. My feelings can be summed up by a photo I saw recently of a woman about my mom’s age holding a sign that read, “I cannot BELIEVE I still have to protest this shit.”

The story eventually moved away from this subject matter, but it is clearly part of the base of the book. I’m glad it’s visible, beneath the tulle and the hair pomade. These issues may be used as political chess pieces by men, but for women, they’re the urgent stuff of our daily lives. We owe much more than we realize to the women who fought not only for our right to a safe abortion (because women will have them, legal or not) but for our right to plan and control how many children we have. We shouldn’t ever take it for granted. Whatever freedoms any of us have, in general, someone else fought and died for them.

By the way, they’re women’s health care clinics, for the most part, not simply “abortion clinics.” Reducing women’s health care centers to “abortion clinics” is inaccurate. Planned Parenthood offers prenatal care for women who want to be pregnant, as well as general women’s health care. When I was in college, they were the only clinic I could afford to go to. I wouldn’t have had any medical care if not for them. The Planned Parenthood clinic I regularly went to for my general medical care was the one that that turd from New Hampshire attacked, about a week after one of my appointments, in fact. He killed the receptionist, and possibly more people, I don’t remember every detail. [Ed note: On December 30, 1994, John Salvi killed receptionist Shannon Lowney in a Planned Parenthood clinic in Brookline, Massachusetts.]

twi-ny: A lot of your illustration work has dealt with women’s undergarments, including Underneath It All, and Unterzakhn translates as “Underthings.” What draws that subject to you?

Leela Corman: Underneath It All was a commission. I’m an illustrator. I work on assignment and can’t control what people think my style is appropriate for. I do what people pay me to, in that realm of my life.

twi-ny: You’re also a professional belly dancer. How did you get into that?

Leela Corman: Quite accidentally. I went to a Moroccan restaurant on Atlantic Avenue that no longer exists, I think, and was pulled up to dance by the house dancer. I just imitated her, and afterwards I thought, hmm, This is fun, maybe I’ll take a class. When I got laid off from my job at Thirteen, I had time, so I signed up for classes at the Greenpoint Y, across the street from my house. The teacher happened to be Ranya Renee, who coincidentally happened to be the perfect teacher for me; she became my mentor, and really turned me into a dancer. I didn’t expect to fall in love with classical Arabic music, and with Egyptian dance in particular, but I did, and I turned out to have a natural ability to do it.

LA VITA E CINEMA — THE FILMS OF NANNI MORETTI: THE SON’S ROOM

Nanni Moretti’s deeply personal THE SON’S ROOM, part of IFC Center retrospective, looks at family tragedy

LA VITA E CINEMA: THE FILMS OF NANNI MORETTI: THE SON’S ROOM (LA STANZA DEL FIGLIO) (Nanni Moretti, 2001)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Sunday, April 1, and Monday, April 2
Series continues through April 5
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

Winner of the Palme D’Or at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, The Son’s Room is a moving look at life, love, and loss. Italian writer-director-actor Nanni Moretti stars as Giovanni, a psychiatrist who can’t control the dissolution of his family following a terrible tragedy. Moretti (Caro Diario, Ecce Bombo) has made a heart-wrenching work that will always be compared with Todd Field’s powerful In the Bedroom, which came out the same year. Both films examine family tragedy with honesty and believability, but whereas the family in In the Bedroom considers revenge, the father in The Son’s Room, achingly played by Moretti, can’t get over wrongly blaming himself, while his wife (Laura Morante, who won the Best Actress award at Cannes for the role) seeks solace in her son’s girlfriend (Sofia Vigliar), whom she had not known about. Moretti is a deeply personal filmmaker; at times you will feel like you are watching a documentary, and it will break your heart. The Son’s Room is screening Saturday and Sunday as part of the IFC Center series “La Vita e Cinema: The Films of Nanni Moretti,” being held in conjunction with the U.S. theatrical release of Moretti’s latest, We Have a Pope, which opens at the IFC Center on April 6. Moretti will discuss the film at the 7:30 screening on March 31. Other films in the retrospective include I Am Self-Sufficient, Bianca, Sweet Dreams, and The Mass Is Ended.

NEW DIRECTORS, NEW FILMS: FEAR AND DESIRE

Stanley Kubrick’s first film, FEAR AND DESIRE, is screening at MoMA as part of New Directors, New Films series

FEAR AND DESIRE (Stanley Kubrick, 1957)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Saturday, March 31, 2:00
Tickets: $12, 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 beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
newdirectors.org

The annual New Directors, New Films series, a joint presentation of MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, has been highlighting works by up-and-coming international directors for more than forty years. But the 2012 slate of films includes one intriguing surprise: Stanley Kubrick’s 1953 seldom-seen psychological war drama, Fear and Desire. Kubrick’s first full-length film, made when he was twenty-four, is a curious tale about four soldiers (Steve Coit, Kenneth Harp, Paul Mazursky, and Frank Silvera) trapped six miles behind enemy lines. When they are spotted by a local woman (Virginia Leith), they decide to capture her and tie her up, but leaving Sidney (Mazursky) behind to keep an eye on her turns out to be a bad idea. Meanwhile, they discover a nearby house that has been occupied by the enemy and argue over whether to attack or retreat. Written by Howard Sackler, who was a high school classmate of Kubrick’s in the Bronx and would later win the Pulitzer Prize for The Great White Hope, and directed, edited, and photographed by the man who would go on to make such war epics as Paths of Glory, Full Metal Jacket, and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Fear and Desire features stilted dialogue, much of which is spoken off-camera and feels like it was dubbed in later. Many of the cuts are jumpy and much of the framing amateurish. Kubrick was ultimately disappointed with the film and wanted it pulled from circulation; instead it was preserved by Eastman House in 1989 and restored twenty years later, which is good news for film lovers, as it is fascinating to watch Kubrick learning as the film continues. His exploration of the psyche of the American soldier is the heart and soul of this compelling black-and-white war drama that is worth seeing for more than just historical reasons. “There is a war in this forest. Not a war that has been fought, nor one that will be, but any war,” narrator David Allen explains at the beginning of the film. “And the enemies who struggle here do not exist unless we call them into being. This forest then, and all that happens now, is outside history. Only the unchanging shapes of fear and doubt and death are from our world. These soldiers that you see keep our language and our time but have no other country but the mind.” Fear and Desire lays the groundwork for much of what is to follow in Kubrick’s remarkable career.

THE BEAT HOTEL

Documentary examines Paris hotel where the Beat Generation came to live and play between 1957 and 1963 (photo by Harold Chapman, 1960)

THE BEAT HOTEL (Alan Govenar, 2011)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, March 30
212-924-3363
www.thebeathotelmovie.com
www.cinemavillage.com

Between 1957 and 1963, a group of American Bohemians moved to Paris in the wake of obscenity trials against the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, settling into a cheap, dirty, nameless hotel in the Latin Quarter run by a woman known as Madame Rachou. Soon christened the Beat Hotel, the site became home to such writers, artists, and poets as Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, Ian Somerville, and Brion Gysin. “The Beat Hotel was a temple of the mind,” resident and artist Elliot Rudie says early on in Alan Govenar’s The Beat Hotel, a new documentary that examines the history and influence of that time. “Once you went through the door into the hotel, you were in another world,” adds photographer Harold Chapman, who took subtle pictures that capture the flavor and essence of what went on at the hotel, where Burroughs finished Naked Lunch, Corso wrote Bomb, and Ginsberg began Kaddish. The eighty-two-minute film features recollections from some of the hotel’s former residents, including Chapman, artist Jean-Jacques Lebel, and Rudie, whose art inspired animations used in the documentary, in addition to book dealers Cyclops Lester and George Whitman, who hung out with the Beats while they were in Paris. Govenar fills in the details with talking heads and reenactments of important scenes, supplemented by Chapman’s photographs. Among the more entertaining stories is one of Corso cutting off Marcel Duchamp’s tie at a party. Although the film never quite achieves the liveliness of the Beat Generation that it seeks to evoke, it is still an interesting look inside a wonderfully creative and fascinating period in twentieth-century literature and the counterculture movement.