Brooklyn Museum screening of I Am Not Your Negro will be followed by discussion of activism with James Baldwin’s niece
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, January 6, free, 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org
The Brooklyn Museum looks to 2018 with its January First Saturday program, “New Year, New Futures.” There will be live music by Sinkane, BEARCAT, Zaven of Resonator Collective (an in-gallery soundscape for the terrific exhibition “Proof: Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo”), and New Kingston; a curator tour of “Rodin at the Brooklyn Museum: The Body in Bronze” with Lisa Small; a hands-on art workshop in which participants can make zines inspired by “Proof”; a community talk with Murad Awawdeh, the vice president of advocacy at the New York Immigration Coalition; a screening of the Oscar-nominated documentary about James Baldwin, I Am Not your Negro (Raoul Peck, 2017), followed by a discussion with activists Jessica Green and Aisha Karefa-Smart (Baldwin’s niece); a Feminist Book Club event focusing on the 1970 book Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement, edited by Robin Morgan, hosted by Glory Edim of Well-Read Black Girl based on selections by Judy Chicago; pop-up gallery talks on “Roots of ‘The Dinner Party’: History in the Making”; a Brooklyn Dance Festival movement workshop and live performances; pop-up poetry with DéLana R. A. Dameron (Weary Kingdom) and Rickey Laurentiis (Boy with Thorn), followed by a signing; and a NYLaughs comedy showcase with Negin Farsad, Nimesh Patel, and Jordan Carlos, hosted by Ophira Eisenberg and followed by a discussion on humor, activism, and crisis. In addition, the galleries will be open late so you can check out “Roots of ‘The Dinner Party’: History in the Making,” “Soulful Creatures: Animal Mummies in Ancient Egypt,” “Proof: Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo,” “Arts of Asia and the Middle East,” “Infinite Blue,” “Ahmed Mater: Mecca Journeys,” “Rodin at the Brooklyn Museum: The Body in Bronze,” “A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt,” and more.
In her new book Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes (Columbia University Press, $20, November 2017), Columbia professor and film historian Annette Insdorf writes that the beginning moments of Costa-Gavras’s masterful 1969 political thriller, Z, “places us metaphorically in the perspective of the investigator even before we meet him: we must be attentive to detail, skeptical, and then capable of seeing the larger picture. Given the film’s incorporation of flashbacks as well, Z builds a cumulative sense of inevitability that the truth will emerge.” Insdorf will be at FIAF on December 12 to sign copies of her book and introduce the 7:30 screening of Z, which is part of the CinéSalon series “Actor’s Choice: Lambert Wilson & Yves Montand,” curated by French actor and singer Wilson. (The film will also be shown at 4:00; both screenings will be followed by a wine reception.) The Algerian-French coproduction was adapted by Costa-Gavras and Jorge Semprún from Vassilis Vassilikos’s novel, a fictionalized account of the 1963 assassination of Greek left-wing antiwar activist Grigoris Lambrakis and the government cover-up that tried to make it look like an unavoidable accident. “Any similarity to real persons and events is not coincidental. It is intentional,” the credits explain. The film opens with rapid cuts of military and religious medals before zeroing in on a meeting in which the General (Pierre Dux) tells fellow law enforcement and governmental figures that they must eradicate the “ideological mildew,” referring to left-wing activists and, specifically, a deputy (Montand), based on Lambrakis, who is scheduled to speak at a large rally. After a violent incident, the Magistrate (Jean-Louis Trintignant) starts interviewing participants and witnesses and refuses to give up even when the General, the Colonel (Julien Guiomar), and other important figures threaten him as he seeks the truth, which doesn’t matter at all to those in power, who feel they understand the larger scheme of things. The Magistrate is helped by a photojournalist (producer Jacques Perrin) who is not afraid of asking penetrating questions and secretly snapping pictures. As the lies build, the truth slowly emerges, but that doesn’t mean the violence is over.
“I’m a natural person to write about a voyeur because I’m a voyeur myself,” award-winning, bestselling journalist Gay Talese says in Myles Kane and Josh Koury’s Voyeur. The documentary makes a voyeur of the viewer as well as it follows the thirty-five-year journalistic relationship and offbeat friendship between Talese, longtime New York Times and Esquire writer and author of such books as Honor Thy Father and Thy Neighbor’s Wife, and Gerald Foos, the owner of a Colorado motel who claims he spent decades spying on people from a special crawl space he built above the rooms. In January 1980, Foos, owner of the Manor House Motel, wrote a letter to Talese, offering him a story about what he was doing; Foos considered himself a researcher, not a pervert or a peeping Tom. Using archival footage, news reports, and new interviews, Kane and Koury follow Foos, his second wife, Anita, and Talese as the journalist prepares to write a major piece for the New Yorker in advance of the release of his latest book, The Voyeur’s Motel. New Yorker articles editor Susan Morrison considers Foos a disturbed sociopath in need of attention, while Grove/Atlantic senior editor Jamison Stoltz and publisher Morgan Entrekin have their doubts about the veracity of Foos’s eerily specific tale. So as questions arise about key facts and Talese’s professional ethics, Foos wonders if he should have remained silent — “I’m used to private spaces, places that nobody could see me and I could see them,” he explains — and an angry Talese faces a potentially tarnished legacy.
