Liz Johnson Artur, Josephine, Peckham, chromogenic photograph, 1995 (Courtesy of the artist. © Liz Johnson Artur)
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, May 4, free (some events require advance tickets), 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org
Spring is in the air at the May edition of the free First Saturdays program at the Brooklyn Museum. There will be live performances by Descarrilao, Arooj Aftab, the Fadara Group (True to Our Native Land, featuring Chief Ayanda Clarke), and Kaleta & Super Yamba Band; an artist and curator talk on “Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall” with Park McArthur, Constantina Zavitsanos, and Allie Rickard; a hands-on workshop in which participants can make print design artwork inspired by several current exhibitions; a screening of the fifteen-minute short Dreams from the Deep End (Modupeola Fadugba, 2018), followed by a discussion with Fadugba, Kristen Windmuller-Luna, and swim team members; an artist and curator tour of “Liz Johnson Artur: Dusha” with Liz Johnson Artur and Drew Sawyer; and teen gallery talks on “One: Egúngún.” In addition, the galleries will be open late so you can check out “Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving,” “Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall,” “Eric N. Mack: Lemme walk across the room,” “One: Do Ho Suh,” “One: Egúngún,” “Something to Say: Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine, Deborah Kass, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Hank Willis Thomas,” “Infinite Blue,” “A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt,” “Kwang Young Chun: Aggregations,” and more.
Director Abel Ferrara packs a whole lot into controversial Italian writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last day on earth in the multinational coproduction Pasolini. Unfortunately, it all ends up a rather confusing jumble, with Ferrara (Bad Lieutenant, The Addiction) and screenwriter Maurizio Braucci (Gomorrah, Black Souls) squeezing too much into too little. Willem Dafoe stars as Pasolini on November 2, 1975, as the director is interviewed by a journalist, reads the newspaper on the couch, sits down at his typewriter to work on his novel Petrolio, edits what would be his final film (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom), and goes cruising to pick up a young stud. Ferrara adds enactments of scenes from the never-realized Porno-Teo-Kolossal, with Pasolini’s real-life lover, Ninetto Davoli, playing the fictional character Epifanio. (Davoli was supposed to play the younger Nunzio in the hallucinatory tale, about a search for faith and the messiah. Davoli is played by Riccardo Scamarcio in Ferrara’s film.) Ferrara never really delves into the internal makeup of Pasolini (The Gospel According to Matthew, Teorema), an openly gay outspoken social and political activist, poet, Marxist, Christian, and documentarian, instead using brief episodes that only touch the surface, as if Dafoe is playing a character based on Pasolini rather than the complex man who was indeed Pasolini. But Ferrara does get very specific about Pasolini’s mysterious, brutal death. Pasolini is screening May 3 at 7:00 in the MoMA series “Abel Ferrara: Unrated” and will be followed by a Q&A with the director and Dafoe.
Abel Ferrara’s third film, following the 1976 pornographic 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy Cat and the 1979 gorefest The Driller Killer, is a low-budget grindhouse female revenge fantasy set on the gritty streets of New York City. In Ms. 45 (also known as Angel of Vengeance), Zoë Tamerlis Lund makes her screen debut as Thana, a mute woman working as a seamstress in the Garment District. After being raped twice in one day on separate occasions, she soon goes all Death Wish / Taxi Driver on men seeking a little more from women. Thana — named after Freud’s death instinct, Thanatos, the opposite of the sex instinct, Eros — grabs herself a .45 and quickly proves she is one helluva shot as she goes out in search of potential victims in Chinatown, Central Park, and the very place where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton sat on a bench, romantically looking out at the Queensboro Bridge in an iconic moment from Manhattan. Ferrara, who plays the masked rapist, captures the nightmarish feel of the city at the time, where danger could be lurking around any corner, with the help of James Lemmo’s lurid, pornlike cinematography and Joe Delia’s jazz-disco soundtrack. Lund would go on to cowrite Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, in which she plays a junkie named Zoë, before drugs killed her in 1999 at the age of thirty-seven. Ms. 45 is a cult classic that keeps getting better with age — and yes, that is a man dressed as Mr. Met at the Halloween party. A new digital restoration will be screening May 7 and 11 in the MoMA series “Abel Ferrara: Unrated,” which runs May 1-31 and includes such other Ferrara works as The Addiction, Welcome to New York, Body Snatchers, King of New York, Fear City, Bad Lieutenant, The Funeral, and his latest, The Projectionist. Ferrara will be at MoMA to participate in discussions following several screenings the first week.
Longtime sound editor and teacher Midge Costin pays tribute to her discipline in the eye- and ear-opening documentary Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound, having its world premiere this week at the Tribeca Film Festival. The celebration of sound focuses on three of the best in the business: three-time Oscar winner Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, The English Patient), four-time Oscar winner Ben Burtt (E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Star Wars), and seven-time Oscar winner Gary Rydstrom (Saving Private Ryan, Toy Story). “Before we were born, you’re looking at darkness. Sound is the first sense that’s plugged in,” Murch says at the beginning of the film. “Six months, seven months into the womb, it’s hearing the mother’s heartbeat, it’s hearing her breathing, it’s hearing Dad shouting from the garage. It’s making sense of the world. You have emerged into a kind of consciousness using only sound. And then you’re born. Sound affects us in a deeper way almost than image does. It goes deeper. And yet we’re naturally, seemingly oblivious to that.”