twi-ny recommended events

JAY MYSELF

Photographer Jay Maisel goes through decades of stuff as he moves out of longtime East Village home in Jay Myself

JAY MYSELF (Stephen Wilkes, 2018)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Wednesday, July 31
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

In 1966, Brooklyn-born photographer Jay Maisel moved into the 1898 Germania Bank Building on the corner of Bowery and Spring, purchased with a now astonishing $25,000 down payment. Nearly fifty years later, in early 2015, after decades of taking pictures and collecting tens of thousands of random items, he was forced to sell the graffiti-laden, six-floor, 36,000-square-foot property because of rising maintenance costs; at fifty-five million dollars, it was the largest private real estate deal in New York history. One of his protégés, Stephen Wilkes — who back in the 1970s knocked on Maisel’s door and showed him his portfolio — documents Maisel’s months-long exit from the landmark building as he and a team of assistants sift through the maelstrom and Maisel regales him with stories from his career, which has included shooting for advertising agencies, Sports Illustrated, New York magazine, and jazz legends. “Objects are there for you only if you really see them. If you don’t, they don’t exist. And a lot of people don’t see things,” Maisel philosophizes. “Before you’re going to be able to see, you have to look. And before you can look, you have to want to look. And art is, to some effect, trying to make others see what you see.”

Documentary follows Jay Maisel’s nearly fifty-year history in the Bank on Spring & Bowery

Maisel, a calm man with a penchant for littering his sentences with curses, leads Wilkes through the six floors, showing items from his vast collection, one that borders on hoarding. “Each floor represented a certain partition of his mind,” Wilkes explains. Wilkes speaks with such other photographers as Jeff Dunas, Duane Michals, Dan Winters, Peter Murphy, Matt Dean, Hale Gurland, Barbara Bordnick, Jamie Smith, and Melchior DiGiacomo, who rave about Maisel’s influence and his iconoclastic personality. “He sees all this potential in things that no one else would. He just has such a sense of play,” his daughter, Amanda, says. Maisel, who carries a camera everywhere he goes, constantly snapping pictures, adds, “What I’m trying to do all the time is to try and see things anew, to see things the way a child would see them.”

The quintessentially New York documentary doesn’t dig too deep into his personal life and tends to be overly worshipful, but Maisel, who turned eighty-eight earlier this year, is an engaging character, chomping on a cigar, telling of his studies at Yale with Josef Albers, and going through boxes and boxes (and boxes and boxes) of stuff — what many would call junk — that he refuses to part with as the team from Moishe’s is faced with a virtually impossible situation. “I think there’s a delight in the perception and the enjoyments of objects,” he notes. There’s also a delight and enjoyment in watching this mensch over the course of seventy-eight minutes. Jay Myself opens at Film Forum on July 31, with Maisel and Wilkes participating in Q&As at several shows from July 31 to August 4.

TWEETUP SPACES

Grand Central is hosting #Tweetups through August 4 (photo by twi-ny/ mdr)

Vanderbilt Hall, Grand Central Terminal
The Africa Center, 1280 Fifth Ave.
Through August 4, free
www.sharedstudios.com/tweetups

Twitter can be a den of iniquity, where both famous and anonymous people share their vitriolic thoughts on the world at large and specific individuals, starting at the very top with the current president of the United States, who is obsessively twitterpated with the social media site. Twitter seeks to change that in at least a small way with #Tweetups, in which Twitter users can speak with one another face-to-face in large-scale Skype-like meetings held in giant containers. One such container, labeled “What’s Happening?,” will be in Vanderbilt Hall in Grand Central Terminal through August 4, offering #Tweetups to passersby, who walk on a red carpet leading into the container, at the end of which is a giant screen connecting to people in other cities. There is also a screen at the Africa Center along Museum Mile.

A red carpet leads you into personal discussions with people around the world (photo by twi-ny/ mdr)

Admission is free, and there is no advance registration necessary. Presented in conjunction with Shared_Studios, “Tweetup Spaces” is happening in forty cities around the world; there is an hourly schedule available so you can choose what location you want to connect with. For example, on July 31 in Grand Central, you can hook up with tweeters in Gaza at 8:00 am, Dallas at 2:00 pm, and Melbourne at 10:00 pm and take part in “#HereWeAre: Celebrating Women around the World,” focusing on discussions involving such hashtags as #SheInspiresMe, #EffYourBeautyStandards, #YesAllWomen, and #EqualPay; on August 1 at the Africa Center, you can converse with people from Lagos at 11:00 am and London at 4:00 and hang around for “The Twitter Table: What’s Happening?,” a noon lunch connecting Harlem and Lagos, followed by a happy hour. Translators and conversation guides are on site to make sure things go smoothly. You can also watch on small monitors #Tweetups going on in other countries. Twitter a place to bring people together instead of tear them apart? What a novel concept!

MOSTLY MOZART FESTIVAL: BLAK WHYTE GRAY

Boy Blue returns to Lincoln Center with Blak Whyte Gray at Mostly Mozart Festival (photo by Richard Termine)

Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College
524 West Fifty-Ninth St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
August 1–3, 7:30
Festival continues through August 9
www.lincolncenter.org
boyblueent.com

London-based troupe Boy Blue’s Blak Whyte Gray made its US debut last November at Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival. The sold-out dance-theater production proved so popular that Lincoln Center is bringing it back, running August 1-3 at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College as part of — surprise! — the annual summer Mostly Mozart Festival. The three-part, ninety-minute piece offers an abstract look at culture and identity, incorporating hip-hop, African chanting, electronics, and more. The music and creative direction are by Boy Blue cofounder Michael “Mikey J” Asante, with choreography and direction by Kenrick “H2O” Sandy, lighting by Lee Curran, and costumes by Ryan Dawson Laight. The August 2 show will be followed by a talk with Sandy and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, professor, and critic Margo Jefferson. “The time is right to ask questions, to break free from the inner tension of a system that isn’t working, and to emerge on the other side to an awakening — a return to roots, a celebration of culture,” Boy Blue’s website explains about Blak Whyte Gray. Mostly Mozart continues through August 9 with plenty of Wolfgang programs as well as Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Yang Liping Contemporary Dance’s Under Siege, and International Contemporary Ensemble performing works by Nathan Davis, Ann Cleare, György Kurtág, Kate Soper, Anahita Abbasi, and Dai Fujikura.

WE CAN’T EVEN — MILLENNIALS ON FILM: FRANCES HA

Frances (Greta Gerwig) has to reexamine her life when her best friend moves on in Frances Ha

FRANCES HA (Noah Baumbach, 2012)
BAMfilm, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Saturday, August 3, 4:30 & 9:15
Series continues through August 6
718-636-4100
www.franceshamovie.com
www.bam.org

Lena Dunham meets Woody Allen and François Truffaut in Noah Baumbach’s utterly delightful and frustratingly believable Frances Ha, screening August 3 in BAM’s “We Can’t Even: Millennials on Film” series. Breakout mumblecore star Greta Gerwig (Hannah Takes the Stairs, Nights and Weekends) plays the title character, a twenty-seven-year-old New York dancer living with her best friend from college, Sophie (Mickey Sumner). They tell each other everything and even sleep in the same bed. “The coffee people are right — we are like a lesbian couple that doesn’t have sex anymore,” Frances playfully tells Sophie. But when Sophie suddenly announces that she’s moving in with her boyfriend, Patch (Patrick Heusinger), Frances’s life starts going on a downward spiral, her childlike manner and carefree attitude no longer as charmingly quirky as it used to be.

She first moves in with hot stud Lev (Adam Driver) and Benji (Michael Zegen), who nicknames her “Undateable.” She suffers a serious setback in the dance company where she apprentices, she’s running out of money, and Sophie is becoming more and more distant. But as Frances grows more and more desperate, she also finally starts taking a longer look at who she is — and who she wants to be. Shot in a deep, penetrating black-and-white by cinematographer Sam Levy, Frances Ha wonderfully captures the life of millennial twentysomethings, from their dependence on texting and self-involvement to their often bewildering inability to think about a real future.

Greta Gerwig cowrote and stars in Noah Baumbachs delightful FRANCES HA

Greta Gerwig cowrote and stars in partner Noah Baumbach’s delightful Frances Ha

Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding) follows Frances as she moves around New York City and goes back to her alma mater, Vassar (which is Baumbach’s also), marking each location as a new phase in her life. Gerwig, who took dance as a child and studied the discipline at Barnard (the choreography in the film is by Max Stone and Travis Waldschmidt), cowrote the script with Baumbach — they are romantic partners as well and had a son in March 2019. Although Gerwig initially did not consider herself for the title role, she is terrific as Frances, sort of the illegitimate daughter of Annie Hall and Antoine Doinel. The soundtrack features music by indie duo Dean + Britta — Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips also play the hosts of a dinner party Frances attends — in addition to Georges Delerue, the French composer of hundreds of films, including many by Truffaut. And yes, Gerwig’s real parents play her mother and father in the film. “We Can’t Even: Millennials on Film” continues at BAM through August 6 with such other works as Gerwig’s directorial debut, Ladybird, Xavier Dolan’s I Killed My Mother, Sean Baker’s Tangerine, and Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour.

MOSCOW MOSCOW MOSCOW MOSCOW MOSCOW MOSCOW

Irina (Tavi Gevinson), Olga (Rebecca Henderson), and Masha (Chris Perfetti) dream of returning to their beloved Moscow in Halley Feiffer’s Chekhov adaptation (photo by Joan Marcus)

Susan & Ronald Frankel Theater, the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space
511 West 52nd St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Monday – Saturday through August 17
646-506-9393
www.mcctheater.org

Earlier this year, I declared Wheelhouse Theater’s Life Sucks., Aaron Posner’s hysterical adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, to be one of the best plays of the year. You can add to that list Halley Feiffer’s uproarious Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow, an ingenious version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. The past few years have seen an explosion of clever, entertaining takes on classic nineteenth-century works by Jane Austen, Henrik Ibsen, William Makepeace Thackeray, Louisa May Alcott, Chekhov, and others, including Posner’s Stupid Fucking Bird (The Seagull) at the now-defunct Pearl, Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, Kate Hamill’s Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Vanity Fair, and Little Women, and Lucas Hnath’s A Doll’s House, Part 2 (not to mention Taylor Mac’s vaudevillian Shakespeare update, Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus). Feiffer and director Trip Cullman have transformed Three Sisters into a viciously satiric and riotous black comedy that gets right to the heart of Chekhov’s 1900 tragedy: Life. Really. Does. Suck. . . . Big-time. Chekhov funny? Well, there’s a reason Pulitzer Prize winner Lanford Wilson subtitled his 1994 translation of Three Sisters “A Comedy in Four Acts.”

The Prozorova clan suffers through a hysterically awful birthday party in Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow (photo by Joan Marcus)

Continuing at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space through August 17, Moscow . . . takes place on Mark Wendland’s spare set, with a few pieces of furniture on an elevated central platform, the audience seated on two sides, facing each other. At one end is a clock that keeps ticking through most of the show, which is annoying until you get used to it. At the other end is a large, colorful mural of Moscow, or “Mockba,” taunting the Prozorova clan, who desperately want to return to their home city, which they departed from when their father’s brigade was reassigned to the country. As the play opens, it is eleven years to the day since they left, in addition to the one-year anniversary of their father’s death and Irina’s (Tavi Gevinson) twentieth birthday, and her celebration isn’t going well. “No offense, but this is the worst party I have ever attended,” middle sister Masha (Chris Perfetti) says. Meanwhile, oldest sister and teacher Olga (Rebecca Henderson) is going off on herself, declaring, “I look like shit, but what else is new. I’ve always looked like shit. Even when I was born, I looked like a little baby-shaped turd. . . . I’m not complaining, mind you. Just stating facts.”

The ersatz leader of this supremely dysfunctional and perpetually depressed family is violinist and intellectual Andrey (Greg Hildreth, who played Olaf in Frozen), an underachiever with the hots for Natasha Ivanovna (Sas Goldberg), who Masha calls “the duuuuuumbest whore.” Soon joining the party are alcoholic army doctor Ivan Romanich Chebutykin (Ray Anthony Thomas), who is holding a torch for the siblings’ long-dead mother; Baron Nikolai Lvovich Tuzenbach (Steven Boyer, whose portrayal of the baron recalls Jeff Biehl’s performance as Vanya in Life Sucks.), who is in love with Irina but is probably gay; Captain Vassily Vasilyevich Solyony (Matthew Jeffers), an angry man obsessed with violence and who regularly sprays perfume in front of himself and then walks into the mist, attempting to make his whole being fragrant; and Alexander Ignatych Vershinin (Alfredo Narciso), a ruggedly handsome lieutenant colonel with a suicidal wife and two daughters and who is in love with Masha, who is married to mousey Latin teacher Fyodor Ilyich Kulygin (Ryan Spahn, who cocreated the Web series What’s Your Emergency with Feiffer).

Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters is given the comic treatment by Halley Feiffer and Trip Cullman (photo by Joan Marcus)

As Andrey and the sisters go nowhere and do nothing, Natasha turns power hungry; meanwhile, Kulygin adores his wife and so puts up with her endless put-downs. “Amo amas amat!” Kukygin says. “UGGHHH!!!” Masha responds despondently. Also shuffling around are the siblings’ elderly, bent-over servant, Anfisa (Ako), who can’t really do much anymore, and the extremely hard-of-hearing octogenarian Ferapont (Gene Jones). “Fuck all of us,” Chebutykin proclaims with a laugh. Indeed, they are all fucked, in one way or another, as they lambaste each other and take refuge in their shared anhedonia, refusing to be happy, mired in their communal misery. It’s a comic frenzy, from start to finish.

Longtime collaborators Feiffer (The Pain of My Belligerence, I’m Gonna Pray for You So Hard) and Cullman (Lobby Hero, Six Degrees of Separation) have captured the essence of Chekhov and Three Sisters, taking the themes of loneliness, home, family, cuckoldry, and unrequited love to rousing extremes. Paloma Young’s costumes contribute mightily to the merriment, particularly Masha’s elegant black mourning dress, worn beautifully by Perfetti (The Low Road, Picnic), who looked resplendent in a white gown a few years back in the Atlantic’s revival of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine, and Henderson (The Wayside Motor Inn, Bright Half Life) in a stylish “J’aime Rodarte, Je Deteste Rodarte” gray T-shirt. The whole cast has a blast, as does the audience in this relentlessly absurd and knee-slapping show that honors Chekhov in its comic madness. For those who believe that life actually does suck, it’s plays like this that give us hope that maybe, just maybe, things aren’t so bad after all in our own lives.

FOR SAMA

Waad al-Kateab documents daily life under constant bombardment in Aleppo in For Sama

FOR SAMA (Waad al-Kateab & Edward Watts, 2019)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, July 26
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com
www.forsamafilm.com

“You’re the most beautiful thing in our life, but what a life I’ve brought you into. You didn’t choose this. Will you ever forgive me?” Waad al-Kateab asks in the extraordinary documentary For Sama. In 2012 during the Arab Spring, Waad, a marketing student at Aleppo University, joined the protests against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. She started taking photos and cell-phone video, then got a film camera as she became a citizen journalist, documenting the escalating conflict, trying to find moments of joy amid the brutal, senseless murders of innocent men, women, and children. She met and fell in love with heroic doctor Hamza al-Kateab, who was determined to keep his hospital running as the bombings got closer. Waad and Hamza got married, and on January 1, 2016, she gave birth to a healthy girl, Sama.

The film, directed by Waad (who also served as cinematographer and producer) and Edward Watts (Escape from ISIS), is a poignant, unflinching confession from mother to daughter, explaining in graphic detail what the families of Aleppo are going through as Russian and Syrian forces and Islamic extremists maintain a constant attack. “We never thought the world would let this happen,” Waad explains as the body count rises — which she intimately shows, not shying away from shots of bloodied victims being brought into the hospital, a pile of dead children, or a desperate attempt to save the life of a mother and a newborn after an emergency caesarean. “I keep filming. It gives me a reason to be here. It makes the nightmares feel worthwhile,” Waad says.

She captures bombings as they happen, films families huddled inside their homes while machine guns can be heard outside, talks to a child who says he wants to be an architect when he grows up so he can rebuild Aleppo. Because she is a woman, Waad gains access to other women that would not be available to a male filmmaker as they share their stories of love and despair. Waad and Hamza plant a lovely garden to bring color to the dank, brown and gray city. A snowfall covers the turmoil in a beautiful sheet of white. The pitter-patter of rain offers a brief respite. But everything eventually gets destroyed as Waad and Hamza struggle with the choice of leaving with Sama or staying to continue their critical roles in the rebellion, she depicting the personal, heart-wrenching images of war — in 2016, her Inside Aleppo reports aired on British television — he tending to the ever-increasing wounded. “The happiness you brought was laced with fear,” Waad tells Sama in voiceover narration. “Our new life with you felt so fragile, as the freedom we felt in Aleppo.” Winner of the Prix L’Œil d’Or for Best Documentary at Cannes among other awards, For Sama opens at the Quad on July 26; on July 27, Waad, Hamza, and Watts will participate in Q&As with Nermeen Shaikh after the 4:45 show and with Tomris Laffly at the 7:00 screening.

ABBAS KIAROSTAMI: A RETROSPECTIVE

Abbas Kiarostami is subject of comprehensive retrospective at IFC, featuring three talks with Godfrey Cheshire

IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
July 26 – August 15
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

“During Godfrey’s several visits to Iran throughout a decade, he formed a relationship with my father that I had rarely seen him having with other writers. I believe this is because of Godfrey’s ability to go beyond the surface, his unique views and interpretations,” Ahmad Kiarostami writes in the foreword to film critic Godfrey Cheshire’s latest book, Conversations with Kiarostami (Film Desk, July 29, $18). In the 1990s, Cheshire went to Iran on multiple occasions to interview writer-director Abbas Kiarostami, helping introduce the new Iranian cinema to the West. Cheshire will be at IFC Center for three special presentations during the fab festival “Abbas Kiarostami: A Retrospective,” a three-week series comprising virtually all of Kiarostami’s shorts and full-length works, from award-winning, well-known tales to rarely screened gems, many in 2K or 4K restorations. Among the films being shown are the Koker Trilogy (Where Is the Friend’s House?, And Life Goes On, Through the Olive Trees), Palme d’Or winner Taste of Cherry, Silver Lion winner The Wind Will Carry Us, the early documentaries First Graders and Homework, and Kiarostami’s first two features, The Traveler and The Report.

Abbas Kiarostami retrospective will feature three special events with critic Godfrey Cheshire (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Abbas Kiarostami looks ever-so-cool at MoMA show in 2007 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

In his Criterion essay on Taste of Cherry, Cheshire writes, “In Abbas Kiarostami’s universe, it might be said, there are no things, only relations between things. Likewise, in his cinema: no films, only relations between films—and within them. And between them and us.” Cheshire will delve into those relations at a trio of talks, beginning July 27 at 7:10 with “Kiarostami and Koker,” focusing on the trilogy and showing Through the Olive Trees. On August 3 at 5:10, for “Unseen Kiarostami,” Cheshire will screen the 1976 comedy A Wedding Suit and talk about that film as well as such other early works as Bread and Alley, Experience, and Fellow Citizen. And on August 4 at 5:20, for “Cinema in Revolution,” Cheshire will be joined by film professor Jamsheed Akrami for a screening of the initially banned Case No. 1, Case No. 2 and a discussion. In his online bio of Kiarostami, Cheshire calls the auteur “the most acclaimed and influential of Iran’s major filmmakers” and notes how in the twenty-first century “Kiarostami broadened his creative focus, devoting more time to forms including photography, installation art, poetry, and teaching,” exemplified by his 2007 exhibition “Image Maker” at MoMA and MoMA PS1. Keep watching twi-ny for reviews of individual films during this must-see retrospective.