twi-ny recommended events

DENEUVE: CHANGING TIMES

Catherine Deneuve will be at BAM Friday night to kick off twenty-five-film retrospective with REPULSION (above) and POTICHE

BAMcinématek
BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
March 4-31
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

They don’t make ’em like Catherine Deneuve anymore. The elegant French superstar, still ravishing at sixty-seven, has had a remarkable career that is still going strong. The longtime Chanel No. 5 spokesmodel has appeared in more than one hundred films, including too many classics to list here, but here are just a few: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, 1964), Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965), The Creatures (Agnès Varda, 1966), Belle de Jour (Luis Buñuel, 1967), The Last Metro (François Truffaut, 1980), Time Regained (Raoul Ruiz, 1999), and A Christmas Tale (Arnaud Desplechin, 2008), all of which are part of an exciting twenty-five-film retrospective at BAM running March 4-31, presented in collaboration with the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and Institut Francais. No mere sex kitten, Deneuve has taken chances from the very beginning, choosing challenging roles and working with such directors as André Téchiné, Louis Malle, François Ozon, Manoel de Oliveira, Marco Ferreri, and others, in addition to those mentioned above. Following last month’s appearance at BAM by her Hunger costar Susan Sarandon, Deneuve will be at the Brooklyn institution Friday to participate in a sold-out Q&A with Ozon and Judith Godrèche after a sneak peek of her latest, Ozon’s Potiche; she will also introduce the 9:40 showing of Repulsion that same night. Deneuve is a marvel to watch on the big screen, mixing intelligence with beauty, vulnerability with a powerful emotional depth and strength that will surprise those who have not seen many of her films. Now is a great time to catch up, and in Brooklyn, of all places.

Catherine Deneuve stars as a bored housewife stalked by an old acquaintance in CHANGING TIMES

CHANGING TIMES (LES TEMPS QUI CHANGENT) (André Téchiné, 2004)
Saturday, March 5, 4:30
www.1000films.com

In 1980, Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu teamed up for the first time in Claude Berri’s Je Vous Aime, followed by François Truffaut’s The Last Metro. They appeared in several more films together but not in dual leading roles since François Dupeyron’s A Strange Place to Meet (1988). Fortunately, in the ensuing years, they have been more successful than the characters they play in André Téchiné’s absorbing drama Changing Times. Deneuve, as beautiful as ever in her early sixties, stars as Cécile, a lonely woman feeling way too settled in her role as wife, mother, and radio host. Depardieu is Antoine, a lonely engineer who has been burning a candle for Cécile, his first love, for more than thirty years. When her grown son, Sami (Malik Zidi), comes to visit, he surprises everyone by bringing his girlfriend, Nadia (Lubna Azabal), and her young son, Said (Jabi Elomri). Both Sami and Nadia have other reasons for coming to Tangier: He wants to see his very good friend Bilal (Nadem Rachati), a groundskeeper for a rich family, and she wants to see her twin sister, Aicha (Azabal), a devout Muslim who works in McDonald’s. Meanwhile, Cécile’s husband, the younger Nathan (Gilbert Melki), hangs around the house, goes for long swims, and takes care of Antoine’s smashed nose. Depardieu is unnerving as a creepy stalker, and Deneuve is enchanting as the bored wife; Téchiné (Scene of the Crime, Alice et Martin) treats their awkward relationship with intelligence and subtlety, allowing it to play out in unexpected ways.

RABBIT MOVIE NIGHTS: PIERROT LE FOU

Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina star in Godard’s colorful crime musical, PIERROT LE FOU

PIERROT LE FOU (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
Rabbitholestudio
33 Washington St., Brooklyn
Wednesday, March 2, free (BYOB), 8:00
718-852-1500
www.rabbitholestudio.com

Art, American consumerism, the Vietnam and Algerian wars, Hollywood, and the cinema itself get skewered in Jean-Luc Godard’s fab feaux gangster flick / road comedy / romance epic / musical Pierrot Le Fou. Based on Lionel White’s novel Obsession, the film follows the chaotic exploits of Ferdinand Griffon (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina, Godard’s then-wife), former lovers who meet up again quite by accident. The bored Ferdinand immediately decides to leave his wife and family for the flirtatious, unpredictable Marianne, who insists on calling him Pierrot despite his protestations. Soon Ferdinand is caught in the middle of a freewheeling journey involving gun running, stolen cars, dead bodies, and half-truths, all the while not quite sure how much he can trust Marianne. Filmed in reverse-scene order without much of a script, the mostly improvised Pierrot Le Fou was shot in stunning color by Raoul Coutard. Many of Godard’s recurring themes and style appear in the movie, including jump cuts, confusing dialogue, written protests on walls, and characters speaking directly at the audience, which is more or less along for the same ride as Ferdinand. And as with many Godard films, the ending is a doozy.

PULSE CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR 2011

David Ellis’s percussive symphony “True Value (pain fukette)” helped him win the Pulse Prize (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Metropolitan Pavilion
125 West 18th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
March 3-6, $20 (children under twelve free)
212-255-2327
www.pulse-art.com

Year in and year out, Pulse Contemporary Art Fair is among the best of the fairs during Armory Arts Week, offering fun and fascinating site-specific installations and special programming. For 2011, Pulse has moved into the Metropolitan Pavilion, where more than fifty international galleries have booths, in addition to another fourteen participating in the upstairs Impulse section. Among the Pulse New York 2011 Projects are a preview of “Assembly,” comprising work by eight emerging Southern California photographers on view March 15 – April 9 at Fred Torres Collaborations on West 29th St.; Craig Damrauer’s vinyl greetings placed throughout the fair; Molly Dilworth’s paint-on-Mylar “Field Test” at the entrance, incorporating X-ray and electron microscopy images; Oskar Schmidt’s HD video “Back Portrait”; and Ben Wolf’s large-scale “Clamber,” centered on an eighteen-foot hull from a salvaged ship abandoned in Newark. Impulse, comprising one-person shows, has some excellent painting, including Jeff Kellar’s “Toler’s Fence,” “Jaded,” and “Barnyard Brawl 1” at Freight + Volume, Sangram Majumdar’s “Behind Things,” “Studio Chair,” and “Nighttree” at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, and Pulse Prize finalist Jinny Yu’s exquisite oil on aluminum works, some flat, others folded and scrunched, such as the triptych “Notes (large),” the embedded “Painting, wiped, on the wall,” and the dreamlike “Black Cloud (small).” The winner of the Pulse Prize for “exceptional artist” in the Impulse section was David Ellis of Joshua Liner, whose installation includes “True Value (pain fukette),” a group of metal and plastic paint cans that come alive and give a percussive concert, in addition to a wall sculpture of resin-encased record covers (no Barry Manilow allowed) and animated videos of splashing paint. Among the downstairs highlights are Dilworth’s “Times Square Test Pour” series at David B Smith, preparatory studies for her massive ground painting in Times Square; new black-and-white paintings by Martin Mull at Samuel Freeman; Pablo Zuleta Zahr’s acrylic C-prints of wandering people at Richard Levy; a preview of Eve Sussman’s nextfilm project at Cristin Tierney; Carlos Garacioca’s photo lightboxes at Habana; Brooklyn-based printmaker and sculptor Beka Goedde’s delightfully soothing mixed media on panel and paper “Moment of Transference” works at Christina Ray; and Margie Livingston’s “Paint Objects” and Heather Gwen Martin’s large-scale “Pigeon Hands” at Luis de Jesus. We always look forward to Jeffrey Blondes’s latest water-related meditative video project at Nicholas Metivier, and this year he has brought the twelve-and-a-half-hour “Bay of Fundy, Long Island West.” Be sure to stop by the Jen Bekman Gallery booth to check out her 20×200 project, which offers limited-edition artwork at ridiculously affordable prices. Pulse Presents will feature performance art and discussions, while Pulse Play highlights such video art as Desi Santiago’s “Work for Love.”

ELLIOTT SHARP AT 60

ISSUE Project Room
110 Livingston St. (entrance at 22 Boerum Pl.)
Friday, March 4, $50-$250, 7:00
718-330-0313
www.issueprojectroom.org
www.elliottsharp.com

Brooklyn’s ISSUE Project Room has gone through a lot of changes in the last year and a half, beginning with the tragic loss of ifs founder and artistic director, Suzanne Fiol, who passed away in October 2009 at the age of forty-nine after battling cancer. And now the nonprofit organization, which promotes itself as “a vital meeting place for the most disparate forms of creativity whose sole criteria embodies the integrity and spirit of artistic expression and exploration,” is moving from its third-floor space in the Old American Can Factory on Third St. into the McKim, Mead, and White building at 110 Livingston St., which was built in 1925 for the Elks Club and was later home to the New York City Board of Education. On March 4, IPR will be holding its first major event in their future home, a sixtieth birthday celebration for master avant-garde musician, composer, producer, and audiovisual artist Elliott Sharp, a benefit hosted by Jo Andres and Steve Buscemi. The evening begins with a 7:00 VIP reception and the premiere of the multimedia work “Trinity,” featuring music by Sharp, film by Andres, and text and narration by Buscemi, followed by a solo acoustic guitar performance by Sharp of “Velocity of Hue” and Sharp with author Jack Womack and poet Tracie Morris. At 8:00, Sharp will perform “The Boreal,” followed by the IPR commission “Occam’s Razor” performed by JACK Quartet and Sirius Quartet and an after-party from 9:00 to 11:30. The benefit committee, chaired by the husband-and-wife team of Andres and Buscemi along with honorary co-chair Marty Markowitz, features such illustrious writers and artists as Paul Auster, Tony Conrad, R. Luke DuBois, Nick Hallett, Jonathan Lethem, Robert Longo, Rick Moody, Kate Valk, and Anne Waldman. VIP tickets are $250 ($200 tax deductible), while concert-only tickets are $50.

CINEKINK 2011

Ilana Rothman’s AN OPEN INVITATION: A REAL SWINGERS PARTY IN SAN FRANCISCO is part of annual CineKink festival

Anthology Film Archives
32 Second St. at Second Ave.
March 1-6, individual programs $9-$12, parties $10-$30, All-Access Pass $60-$80
www.cinekink.com

Last month, the Quad presented “A Week of Sex in Cinema,” featuring such controversial films as Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs, and Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Betty Blue, which all pushed the boundaries of on-screen sex. Well, the annual Cinekink festival cuts right to the chase, focusing on the sex and not the controversy. Running March 1-6, Cinekink will be hosting such programs as “Kink Crusaders,” “Sexual Radar,” “Crave,” “Adventures in the Skin Trade,” “Porn Again,” and “Lust, Love, Life,” showing such films as Love Hotel, Hooka Face and the Virgin Boy, Teat Beat of Sex, Artcore, Trannywood Gone Wild, The Erotic Couch, Billy Castro Does the Mission, GayKeith, Return of the Post Apocalyptic Cowgirls, 52 Takes of the Same Thing. Then Boobs, Chained! and Passion, Fruit. The kick-off party takes place tonight at Taj Lounge, followed by screenings at Anthology Film Archives.

SCOPE NEW YORK 2011

Cinders Gallery’s “The Outer-Boroughs Cyclical Non-Cynical Art School of Thought” will be part of “us vs us” program at Scope

320 West St. at the West Side Highway across from Pier 40
First View: Wednesday, March 2, $100, 3:00 – 9:00 pm
General Admission: March 3-6, $20
www.scope-art.com

This year Scope is expanding into a sixty-thousand-square-foot space along the West Side Highway, where more than fifty international exhibitors will have work on view, including a.m.f. projects, Mindy Solomon, Galeria Christopher Paschall, Galerie Von Braunbehrens, Gallery Dukan & Hourdequin, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, Paci Arte, and Aureus Contemporary. Scope will host numerous special events during the fair, centered around “us vs us,” which takes place in the fenced-in mezzanine and consists of such site-specific performance art pieces as “Come On Guy,” Craig Smith’s “Stacking Boats: A Lesson Plan,” Stephanie Diamond’s “Home Away from Home” corner store, Cinders Gallery’s “The Outer-Boroughs Cyclical Non-Cynical Art School of Thought,” and Grace Space’s “The Way to Love Me,” in which members of the audience are encouraged to lie to one another. Other special projects include the Rebaroque Artist Series Sound Wall, a film program from Robert Boyd, and the West Harlem Art Fund’s “Gumboot Dance.”

POOL ART FAIR 2011

Matt Bahen, “Gatekeeper,” oil on canvas, 2010

Gershwin Hotel
7 East 27th St. at Fifth Ave.
March 4-6, suggested donation $10 (vernissage and party $50), 3:00 – 10:00 pm
www.poolartfair.com
www.gershwinhotel.com

Organized by Frère Independent, the PooL Art Fair features unrepresented artists not seen at other art fairs, offering collectors, gallerists, and art lovers the opportunity to get in on the ground floor with emerging talent. The fair opens on Thursday at 3:00, followed by vernissage at 6:00 and a party at 10:00 with a DJ and open bar ($50). The art is spread out in more than thirty rooms on the fourth, fifth, and sixth floors, in addition to the lobby, with a focus on painting. Among the stronger works are two large-scale, densely textured oils by Matt Bahen depicting mysterious locations with dogs, “Gatekeeper” and “We Carved Our Names”; Bob Clyatt’s “Reframing Figurative Sculpture,” particularly three male figures hanging upside down; Claudie Bastide’s “Freedom and Random,” consisting of French Abstraction Lyrique canvases bathed in reds and yellows and blacks; Dan Pottick’s photographs of naked threesomes playing together, in the same room with several lovely paintings by Lola Morishita; and dirquo nyc/++’s and Tracey Kessler’s graffiti-culture abstract works. As you walk into each hotel room, you’re also entering each artist’s unique vision of the world, with most of them there to share it with you, so be sure to say hello and ask questions.