Iconic Chinese star Ruan Lingyu gives one of her best performances in silent classic The Goddess
THE GODDESS (SHEN NU) (Wu Yonggang, 1934)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
144 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Thursday, December 21, 8:30
Series runs December 13 – January 7
212-875-5050 www.filmlinc.org
Wu Yonggang’s directorial debut, The Goddess, made for Lianhua Film Company after he worked as a designer for the Shaw brothers, is a socially conscious, emotive tale about one woman’s struggle to give her young son a better life than her own. The seventy-three-minute silent film opens with a series of shots by cinematographer Hong Weilie that follows the evening light, from the setting sun to a man on a ladder lighting a street corner oil lamp to an apartment window seen from the outside. Wu then cuts to inside the room, revealing a dressing table with lots of makeup, then a pair of dresses hanging on the wall, and a doll. The camera next rises from an empty basket on the floor to a nervous woman (Ruan Lingyu) cradling a baby. She looks at a clock; it is time for her to leave her child and walk the streets of the city to make money. It’s a melancholy scene in a melancholy film, but the unnamed prostitute is no mere hooker with a heart of gold; she is a determined yet fragile woman who will do anything for her son, Shuiping (Keng Li). Running from the police, she is helped by Zhang (Zhang Zhizhi), a low-level gangster who decides to become her pimp, regularly taking her money and threatening her future, and that of her son’s. Whenever she attempts to raise her station, particularly when she saves enough money to send Shuiping to private school, there is always something that brings her back down.
A prostitute (Ruan Lingyu) dreams of a better life for her son (Keng Li) in Wu Yonggang’s The Goddess
Writer-director Wu also designed the sets, which include German Expressionist-type buildings and alleyways along with blinking neon towers and stores. Large columns increase in number, as if creating bars around the woman. Holding on to Shuiping, the woman is seen through Zhang’s spread legs, trapped. Using soft focus, superimposition, and slow fades — the camera cannot get enough of Ruan’s expressive face — Wu depicts her nightly travails as she smokes cigarettes and looks for her next customer. In one memorable scene, Wu shows only feet on the sidewalk as she is propositioned and accepts. But he never sentimentalizes the fallen woman, instead making her a tragic example of societal ills in 1930s China, especially gender and class hierarchies, as explained by the school’s principal. “She is a human being and has her human rights — so does her son,” he says. Unfortunately, most everyone else does not agree. The Goddess is a silent film classic, a major success in China; Wu (The Desert Island, Loyal Family) remade it with sound in 1938 as Rouge Tears. Sadly, Ruan, a huge star, had serious personal problems and committed suicide in 1935, at the age of twenty-four, a victim of gossip and physical abuse; Stanley Kwan’s award-winning 1992 biopic, Centre Stage, detailed her life, with Maggie Cheung playing Ruan. (Visual artist Isaac Julien re-created scenes from The Goddess with Zhao Tao and also cast Cheung as Goddess of the Sea in his nine-screen 2013 MoMA installation, Ten Thousand Waves.) The Chinese title, shennü, refers to both a goddess and a prostitute; Wu, and Ruan, reveals that one does not preclude the other. The Goddess is screening December 21 at the Walter Reade Theater in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama,” with live piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin. The series, which divides its more than fifty films into four categories — Silent Screen, Hollywood’s Golden Age, International Classics, and Modern/Postmodern Drama — continues through January 7 with works by Yasujirô Ozu, Arturo Ripstein, Charlie Chaplin, Pedro Almodóvar, Clint Eastwood, Guy Maddin, Douglas Sirk, Leo McCarey, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Vincente Minnelli, Terence Davies, and many more.
The Bergers sit down for some food and tsouris in New Yiddish Rep adaptation of Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! at the 14th Street Y (photo by Pedro Hernandez)
VAKH OYF UN ZING
Theater at the 14th Street Y
344 East 14th St. at First Ave.
Tuesday – Saturday through December 24, $45
646-395-4310 www.newyiddishrep.org www.14streety.org
In her 1983 book From Stereotype to Metaphor: The Jew in Contemporary Drama, Ellen Schiff calls Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! “the earliest quintessentially Jewish play outside the Yiddish theatre. It bears the unmistakable stamp of authenticity, exactly what one would wish from a Jewish dramatist writing a slice of Jewish life problem play.” That stamp of authenticity is at the center of a new version by New Yiddish Rep, continuing at the Theater at the 14th Street Y through Christmas Eve. The show is adapted and directed by New Yiddish Rep artistic director David Mandelbaum, using Chaver Paver’s Yiddish translation for Jacob Mestel’s 1938 Federal Theatre production. During the Depression, the Berger family is trying to get by in their crowded Bronx apartment, where they are not exactly living the immigrant American dream. Matriarch Bessie Berger (Ronit Asheri-Sandler) is desperate for her children to marry well, but son Ralph (Moshe Lobel), a wannabe entertainer, is secretly dating a young woman from a poor family and daughter Hennie (Mira Kessler) doesn’t seem to like any of her suitors, who include Moe Axelrod (Gera Sandler), a shady operator who lost his leg in the war, and Sam Feinschreiber (Luzer Twersky), for whom Hennie has no desire. Bessie’s husband, Myron (Eli Rosen), is a gentle man who can’t keep a good job and instead puts money on the horses, while Bessie’s elderly father, Jacob (Mandelbaum), wanders around the apartment listening to opera and spouting Marxist doctrine. Bessie’s sister, Mimi (Amy Coleman), occasionally stops by to gossip and gloat. When Hennie gets pregnant and the man who did it is instantly out of the picture, the close-knit but argumentative family has some important decisions to make, facing difficult choices in very hard times.
Hennie Berger (Mira Kessler) and Moe Axelrod (Gera Sandler) have one of many disagreements in New Yiddish Rep production of Awake and Sing! (photo by Pedro Hernandez)
Awake and Sing! premiered on Broadway in 1935 with the sensational cast of Luther Adler, Stella Adler, Morris Carnovsky, John Garfield, and Sanford Meisner. In 2013, the National Asian American Theatre Co. staged a strong version with an all-Asian cast. But the show really feels at home in this Yiddish production, featuring a charming apartment set by Nathan Rosen, with an old radio and Victrola, a kitchen table, a couch, an armchair, and a daybed in the corner of the living room, where Ralph sleeps. The Bergers complain about life and love in Yiddish, with English supertitles. The whole thing is warm and comfy, with an emphasis on the status and power of women in Jewish families; the men in the show are at the mercy of the women. In addition, the part of Mimi was originally written for a man, Morty, but it has been skillfully changed to a successful businesswoman, something that was relatively unusual in 1930s America. Asheri-Sandler, who is married to Sandler in real life, is wonderfully domineering as Bessie, while Lobel ably personifies a man refusing to give up on his dreams. The play sounds absolutely lovely in Yiddish, flowing with the beauty and angst ingrained in the language like no other. It’s almost disappointing when English words or lines suddenly show up, probably because there’s no legitimate translation for them. The theater is also filled with Yiddish songs as the audience enters and during intermission, adding to the nostalgic atmosphere. Established in 2013 to keep Yiddish theater alive, New Yiddish Rep has previously staged Waiting for Godot, Death of a Salesman, Rhinoceros, and a double bill of one-acts by Wolf Mankowitz. Awake and Sing! is a natural for them, and they do Odets, and Yiddish theater, proud.
Nikolai Yezhov (Zach Grenier) and Isaac Babel (Danny Burstein) begin a dangerous friendship in Describe the Night (photo by Ahron R. Foster)
Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater
336 West 20th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 24, $51-$86.50
866-811-4111 atlantictheater.org
At the beginning of Rajiv Joseph’s extraordinary Describe the Night, Isaac Babel (an almost unrecognizable Danny Burstein), a military journalist covering the Polish-Soviet War in 1920, has stopped in the Polish countryside and says to himself, “Describe the night . . . Describe the air . . . Describe the field . . .” as he unsuccessfully tries to capture their essence in his diary. He is soon joined by Russian captain Nikolai Yezhov (Zach Grenier). “The night. Describe it,” Isaac says. “Why?” Nikolai asks, dumbfounded. Isaac explains, “I just described it in my journal. I’m wondering how you would describe it. And if we both describe the same thing at the same time, will one of our descriptions be more true than the other?” Joseph’s follow-up to Guards at the Taj and Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo is a glorious, difficult-to-describe work that searches for the truth amid many lies, melding fact and fiction in creating a wildly unpredictable, endlessly adventurous tale that is as historical as it is contemporary. (At one point, a character says, “Go ahead, write your fake news story.”) The swiftly moving 165-minute play is told in three acts of four scenes each, featuring such titles as “Lies,” “Fate,” “Blood,” “Asylum,” and “Freedom,” shifting back and forth between 1920, 1937, 1940, 1989, and 2010, from Smolensk to Moscow to Dresden. As Isaac becomes a successful and well-respected writer, he maintains an odd friendship with Nikolai, who rises in the ranks of Stalin’s secret police; Isaac also has an extra-close relationship with Nikolai’s wife, Yevgenia (Tina Benko). Meanwhile, in 1989 Dresden, Russian KGB agent Vova (Max Gordon Moore) is determined to not let young Polish immigrant Urzula (Rebecca Naomi Jones) defect to the West, for both personal and political reasons. And in 2010, a plane flying from Poland to Russia to honor the seventieth anniversary of the Katyn Massacre in WWII crashes in Smolensk, setting journalist Mariya (Nadia Bowers) on the run, where she encounters young Feliks (Stephen Stocking), who just wants to avoid trouble. Through the years, various characters and their stories intersect in unexpected ways as Isaac’s diary makes its way around the world.
Rajiv Joseph’s Describe the Night climbs high at the Atlantic (photo by Ahron R. Foster)
Continuing at the Atlantic through December 24, Describe the Night is a gorgeously ambitious play, continually challenging the audience with its unconventional twists and turns. Director Giovanna Sardelli, who has previously collaborated with Joseph on Archduke and Guards at the Taj, brilliantly navigates through the multiple time periods and Tim Mackabee’s mostly simple but effective changing sets. Six-time Tony nominee Burstein (Fiddler on the Roof, The Drowsy Chaperone) is gentle and touching as Isaac, a man who believes that his principles will triumph over tyranny; Tony nominee Grenier (33 Variations, The Good Wife) is an excellent counterpoint, loud and blustery as Nikolai, a proud but uncomplicated man who is able to overlook friendship when necessary for the sake of the party. Benko (Scenes from a Marriage, Desdemona) excels as the strangely mysterious Yevgenia, while Stocking (Archduke, Dance Dance Revolution) embodies all of our everyday fears with an intense quirkiness. The Playbill comes with an extra sheet that details the true stories of Isaac, Nikolai, Yevgenia, and the Smolensk crash; be sure not to read it until after the show to fully appreciate the artistic license Joseph takes in transforming this tale into so much more. “You’re a media person, and so you you you love to make up stories that are more interesting than what the truth is and what the truth is that sometimes planes try to land in a heavy fog over a forest and then hit trees and crash,” Feliks tells Mariya. So how to succinctly describe Describe the Night? Truthfully, it’s indescribable.
Tony winner Billy Crudup stars as a man in search of his genuine identity in Harry Clarke (photo by Carol Rosegg)
Vineyard Theatre
Gertrude and Irving Dimson Theatre
108 East 15th St. between Union Square East & Irving Pl.
Extended through December 23, $120 www.vineyardtheatre.org
Tony winner Billy Crudup charms the audience much as the character he plays charms the Schmidt family in David Cale’s riveting one-man show, Harry Clarke. In his first solo performance, Crudup is captivating as Philip Brugglestein, a wayward midwesterner who invented an alter ego, the British-speaking Harry Clarke, as a psychological defense against bullying schoolmates and his mentally and physically abusive father. As an adult, Philip has moved to New York City, where he is floundering. One day, in the mood for an adventure, he follows a random guy in the street; later, he befriends the man, a wealthy financier named Mark Schmidt, but Philip introduces himself as his childhood creation, pretending to be the fun-loving Harry Clarke, a smooth operator from Elstree. (He even claims that he worked for Sade for twenty years.) Harry insinuates himself into Mark’s life, as well as that of Mark’s sister, Stephanie, and mother, Ruth, in a way reminiscent of Tom Ripley in Patricia Highsmith’s books except Harry is no mere con man out for money; he’s seeking connections, searching for his identity, as are most of the characters in the play. “I could be myself if I had an English accent,” he recalls saying as child, later telling his parents, “But it’s my real voice.” Soon Harry finds himself caught up in a situation that he didn’t quite expect.
Billy Crudup voices multiple characters in world premiere of David Cale one-man show at the Vineyard (photo by Carol Rosegg)
An actor, composer, and playwright who was born in London and moved to New York when he was twenty, Cale originally wrote Harry Clarke for himself — he has previously written and starred in such solo works as Lillian, Deep in a Dream of You, and The Redthroats and has appeared on The Good Wife and in The Total Bent at the Public — but he eventually opted for Crudup, who has been nominated for four Tonys, winning one (for The Coast of Utopa), and has had major roles in such films as Almost Famous and Jesus’ Son. In his third play at the Vineyard, following Chiori Miyagawa’s America Dreaming and Adam Rapp’s The Metal Children, Crudup commands the virtually bare stage with a tender fury; Alexander Dodge’s set features a lone chair on a deck, a small table where Crudup keeps a glass of water, and a scrim in back for abstract projections that hint at a blue sea and sky, with occasional changes. Two-time Obie winner and Tony nominee Leigh Silverman (Violet, In the Wake), who directed Marin Ireland in the searing one-woman show On the Exhale earlier this year, knows just when to get Crudup on the move. Crudup (Waiting for Godot,No Man’s Land) sits casually before at last getting up and really hitting his stride, doing different voices for every character; the writing is so sharp, and the performance so astute, with a cinematic fervor, that you can easily visualize the places Harry goes, from Sixth Ave. to a gay bar to relaxing on board the Schmidts’ boat, Jewish American Princess. Harry is a big movie fan, preferring noirs and thrillers and listening to records by French film composer Georges Delerue, and Cale’s play becomes like a noir thriller itself; it’s no coincidence that Mark wants to become a movie producer. When Harry and Mark meet for the second time, in a theater, Harry says, “This play’s like a mystery, in that sense, seems more like a movie.” Meanwhile, Philip, of course, is a completely unreliable narrator; all of the events are related through his warped, damaged, unpredictable view, as if he’s created his own movie, but that’s part of what makes the show so tantalizing.
It’s not Christmas in New York until Darlene Love comes to town
Hanukkah is under way and Christmas is right around the corner, so the city is filled with holiday-themed comedy shows and concerts. They range from classical performances at the Met and Carnegie Hall to hip-hop, soul, and rock extravaganzas at smaller clubs to Jewish takes on the season. Below is a sampling of some of the cooler events; keep watching this space for more additions.
The Fire & Ice Hanukkah Celebration!, with fire dancers, fire breathers, poi juggling, live musical performances, Israeli music with DJ Adidor, glow in the dark madness, Hanukkah video art installations, Hanukkah drink specials, chocolate dessert bar, sufganiyot, and more, Highline Ballroom, 431 West 16th St., 212-414-5994, $40, 8:00
Thursday, December 14
through
Saturday, December 16 The 38th Annual Winter Solstice Celebration, with the Paul Winter Consort and Forces of Nature Dance Theatre, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, 1047 Amsterdam Ave., $40-$150
Sunday, December 17 Natasha’s Christmas Spirit Brunch Show, with Matt Koplik, Danny Caraballo, Brian Klimowski, Hallie Brevetti, Sophie Bell, Abby Goldfarb, and Alexandria Grace Williams, hosted by Natasha Edwards, benefiting the HAVE Foundation (Honduras Agalta Valley Education), Stand Up NY, 236 West 78th St., $20, 2:00
Unsilent Night, participatory boombox concert with Phil Kline, Washington Square Park, free, 6:00
New York Baroque Incorporated: Baroque Holiday Music and Dance, led by Robert Mealy, with dancers Caroline Copeland and Carlos Fittante, featuring suites by Rameau, Lully, Purcell, and Handel, the Met Fifth Avenue, 1000 Fifth Ave., $65 (includes same-day museum admission), 7:00
Ronnie Spector will celebrate the annual best Christmas ever at City Winery
Wednesday, December 20
and
Thursday, December 21 Ronnie Spector’s Best Christmas Party Ever! with Ronnie Spector and the Ronettes, City Winery, 155 Varick St., 212-608-0555, $35-$75, 8:00
Sunday, December 24 A Very Jewish Christmas, with Brad Trackman, Ophira Eisenberg, Jared Freid, Jon Fisch and others, Gotham Comedy Club, 208 West 23rd St., 212-367-9000, $25, 7:00 & 9:00
The Jew(ish) Show, with Jared Freid, Marion Grodin, Myq Kaplan, and Talia Reese, Stand Up NY, 236 West 78th St., $20, 8:00
Monday, December 25 Oy Vey Festival w/ Soulfarm, featuring Kosha Dillz, Zalman Krause, Meir Kay, and Chillent, Highline Ballroom, 431 West 16th St., 212-414-5994, $20-$49.99, 8:00
Theater doesn’t get much more immersive — or personally involving — than Mark and Marichka Marczyk’s Counting Sheep, a nonstop, exhilarating, highly emotional experience that puts you right in the middle of a re-creation of the stalwart Revolution of Dignity that took place in February 2014 in Kiev, as Ukrainians rose up against President Viktor Yanukovych’s corrupt, Russia-friendly, anti-EU policies. The international Occupy movement meets Les Miz in the multimedia production, continuing at 3LD through December 17. Ingeniously conceived by the Marcyzks, who met during the protests and fell in love, the seventy-five-minute interactive show invites the audience to participate as much as they’d like, from dining at a long, communal table with various characters to carrying banners, throwing (foam) bricks, singing songs, dancing, and building a barricade. It’s virtually all in Ukrainian, except for occasional facts, figures, and slogans projected onto the walls in English, but that won’t prevent you from understanding what the common people and revolutionaries are singing and saying as they battle the special police force known as the Berkut. The dedicated cast, wearing sheep masks, consists primarily of Toronto’s Lemon Bucket Orkestra (which refers to itself as “a guerilla-punk-balkan-folk-brass band”), featuring violinist Mark Marczyk, trombonists Eli Camilo and Nathan Dell-Vandenberg, darbouka player Jaash Singh, trumpeter Michael Louis Johnson, guitarist Alex Nahirny, percussionist Oskar Lambarri, singer Tamar Ilana, dancer and percussionist Stephania Woloshyn, cellist Volodymyr Bedzvin, and Natalia Telentso and George Rush. (Music director Marichka Marczyk was only recently replaced in the cast because she is in her third trimester.) The revolutionaries are played by Joshua Hopkins, Taylor Kozak, Matt McGill, Adam Munoz, and Danielle Ruth, with Dima Nechepurenko as the roving cameraman, his live shots often projected onto the walls, along with archival footage and actual television reports.
Cocreator Mark Marczyk surveys the damage done in immersive multimedia production at 3LD (photo by Mati Bardosh Gelman)
Don’t worry if you didn’t spring for the extra thirty bucks to sit at the table and eat the opening meal; the menu, from Veselka, includes fried pierogi, borscht, kasha, mushroom stroganoff, cucumber salad, rye bread, sliced pickles, sour cream, applesauce, and fried onions, but some of it is served later for free as sustenance is needed to keep the struggle going. The actors will not force you to do anything you don’t want to, but the more you get involved, the more you will get out of this breathtaking, breathlessly paced show, which is directed by Kevin Newbury and the Marczyks, with the ever-frantic set design and costumes by Vita Tzykun, lighting by Eric Southern, movement by Chloe Treat, fight direction by Joseph Travers, and video design by Greg Emetaz, immersing the audience in the carefully controlled chaos. Photography is allowed, but don’t get too caught up in capturing things on film and instead go full throttle with your participation, constructing lasting memories in your head and heart. Billed as an “Immersive Guerrilla Folk Opera,” Counting Sheep might ostensibly be about the Maidan revolution, but it could really be about any of the recent events in which the people stood up to the government, usually paying a high price. By the end, you’ll be exhausted and uplifted and might even break into tears. Finally, there is no program to give further information about the cast, crew, and show; instead, you’re left to venture into the good night, processing your own private experience of this unique and powerful creation. (The Lemon Bucket Orkestra will be celebrating the end of the New York run of Counting Sheep with a concert at 3LD on December 16 at 11:00 pm; tickets are $20.)
Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman star in Douglas Sirk’s gorgeous Technicolor emotional melodrama All That Heaven Allows
ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS (Douglas Sirk, 1955)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater, Francesca Beale Theater
144/165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Wednesday, December 13, 6:30
Monday, January 1, 7:00
Series runs December 13 – January 6
212-875-5050 www.filmlinc.org
Forget about It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street, and endless versions of A Christmas Carol; our favorite holiday movie is Douglas Sirk’s sensationally strange and beautiful All That Heaven Allows, which you can see December 13 and January 1 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s four-week, fifty-four-movie, get-out-your-handkerchiefs series “Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama.” Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman, who played characters who fell in love in Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession, are at it again in All That Heaven Allows. This time around, Hudson is Ron Kirby, a softhearted, hunky gardener who prefers a simple, outdoorsy life yet is drawn to Cary Scott (Wyman), an older widow who is firmly entrenched in her community’s country-club lifestyle with her best friend, Sara (Agnes Moorehead). Kirby and Cary begin a passionate affair but when they decide to wed, the snooty members of the town’s social register are thoroughly appalled and do everything in their power to drive them apart because of class, wealth, and age differences. (At thirty-seven, Wyman was a mere eight years older than Hudson in real life.) Meanwhile, Cary’s kids, high schooler Kay (Gloria Talbott) and college student Ned (William Reynolds), find their mother’s impending marriage to Kirby disgusting and distasteful as well, preferring she marry Harvey (Conrad Nagel), a plain, sexless widower. In 1950s America, women were still subservient to the needs of men and to raising their children, not permitted by society to lead their own lives and make decisions for themselves, especially when it came to their sexuality. The film features an essentially nonreligious belief system that is embodied by Kirby, who is inspired by the writings on naturalism and the true meaning of success espoused by Henry David Thoreau in Walden. Indeed, the outside world is central to the film; Sirk and his longtime cinematographer, Russell Metty, let the camera linger on trees, lakes, snow banks, and deer. Flowers abound indoors and out, and windows always look out on beautiful scenery, as if paintings, accompanied by Frank Skinner’s equally lush score and Bill Thomas’s colorful costumes.
It all makes for the kind of candy-coated America that David Lynch turned upside down and inside out in Blue Velvet and that directly influenced Todd Haynes’s 2002 Sirk homage, Far from Heaven, in which white Connecticut housewife Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore), who is married to a closeted white executive (Dennis Quaid), becomes perhaps too friendly with her black gardener (Dennis Haysbert), a melding of All That Heaven Allows and Sirk’s Imitation of Life. (Both Far from Heaven and Imitation of Life are part of the series as well.) At one point, Kirby talks about how his best friend learned to be his own man. “And you want me to be a man,” Cary says. “Only in that one way,” Kirby responds, playfully looking over at Cary; it’s as if Hudson is teasing her about his real-life sexuality. People’s double nature is reflected throughout, as Sirk and Metty use fireplace screens, windshields, mirrors, and even a television set to create physical separation between characters as well as the inner and outer parts of the same character. In addition, there is a vast array of ties, cravats, scarves, ascots, bow ties, and other articles of clothing that everyone wears around their necks, as if their true feelings are always being choked and hidden. It’s a magnificent film, richly textured and multilayered, not nearly as cynical and tongue-in-cheek as some claim it to be. All That Heaven Allows is screening December 13 and January 1 in “Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama,” which divides its films into four categories: Silent Screen, Hollywood’s Golden Age, International Classics, and Modern/Postmodern Drama, with works by Yasujirô Ozu, Martin Scorsese, Pier-Paolo Pasolini, Charlie Chaplin, Pedro Almodóvar, Clint Eastwood, Federico Fellini, Youssef Chahine, David Lean, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Vincente Minnelli, Max Ophüls, and many more.
Sergey Urusevsky’s dazzling camera work is a character unto itself in The Cranes Are Flying
THE CRANES ARE FLYING (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957)
Sunday, December 17, 4:00
Saturday, December 30, 3:30 www.filmlinc.org
Even at a mere ninety-seven minutes, Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying is a sweeping Russian antiwar epic, an intimate and moving black-and-white tale of romance and betrayal during WWII. Veronika (Tatyana Samojlova) and Boris (Aleksey Batalov) are madly in love, swirling dizzyingly through the streets and up and down a winding staircase. But when Russia enters the war, Boris signs up and heads to the front, while Veronika is pursued by Boris’s cousin, Mark (Aleksandr Shvorin). Pining for word from Boris, Veronika works as a nurse at a hospital run by Boris’s father, Fyodor Ivanovich (Vasili Merkuryev), as the family, including Boris’s sister, Irina (Svetlana Kharitonova), looks askance at her relationship with Mark. The personal and political intrigue comes to a harrowing conclusion in a grand finale that for all its scale and scope gets to the very heart and soul of how the war affected the Soviet people on an individual, human level, in the family lives of women and children, lovers and cousins, husbands and wives.
Unforeseen circumstances trap Veronika (Tatyana Samojlova) in wartime Russia in Mikhail Kalatozov’s masterful The Cranes Are Flying
The only Russian film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes by itself, The Cranes Are Flying is a masterful work of art, a searing portrait of the horrors of war as seen through the eyes of one desperate woman. Adapting his own play, Viktor Rozov’s story sets up Boris and his family as a microcosm of Soviet society under Stalin; it’s no coincidence that the film was made only after the leader’s death. It’s a whirlwind piece of filmmaking, a marvelous collaboration between director Kalatozov, editor Mariya Timofeyeva (Ballad of a Soldier), composer Moisey Vaynberg (the opera The Passenger), and cinematographer Sergey Urusevsky, who also worked with Kalatozov on I Am Cuba and The Unsent Letter; Urusevsky’s camera, often handheld, is simply dazzling, whether moving through and above crowd scenes, closing in on Samojlova’s face and Batalov’s eyes, or twirling up at the sky. Poetic and lyrical, heartbreaking and maddening, The Cranes Are Flying is an exquisite example of the power of cinema. You can see it December 17 and 30 in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama,” which also features works by D. W. Griffith, F. W. Murnau, Oscar Micheaux, Nicholas Ray, George Cukor, Ida Lupino, Leo McCarey, Ritwik Ghatak, Mikio Naruse, Jacques Demy, Lars von Trier, Guy Maddin, and many more.
Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka) lives a life filled with misery after misery in Mizoguchi melodrama
THE LIFE OF OHARU (SAIKAKU ICHIDAI ONNA) (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1952)
Monday, December 18, 1:30
Saturday, January 6, 3:45 www.filmlinc.org
We used to think that Aki Kaurismäki’s The Match Factory Girl was the saddest film ever made about a young woman who just can’t catch a break, as misery after misery keeps piling up on her ever-more-pathetic existence. But the Finnish black comedy has nothing on Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Life of Oharu, a searing, brutal example of the Buddhist observation of impermanence and the role of women in Japanese society. The film, based on a seventeenth-century novel by Ihara Saikaku, is told in flashback, with Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka) recounting what led her to become a fifty-year-old prostitute nobody wants. It all starts to go downhill after she falls in love with Katsunosuke (Toshirô Mifune), a lowly page beneath her family’s station. The affair brings shame to her mother (Tsukie Matsuura) and father (Ichiro Sugai), as well as exile. The family is redeemed when Oharu is chosen to be the concubine of Lord Matsudaira (Toshiaki Konoe) in order to give birth to his heir, but Lady Matsudaira (Hisako Yamane) wants her gone once the baby is born, and so she is sent home again, without the money her father was sure would come to them.
Mizoguchi’s The Life of Oharu is an elegant film about one woman’s struggle to survive in a cold world
Over the next several years, Oharu becomes involved in a series of personal and financial relationships, each one beginning with at least some hope and promise for a better future but always ending in tragedy. Nevertheless, she keeps on going, despite setback after setback, bearing terrible burdens while never giving up. Mizoguchi (Sansho the Bailiff, The 47 Ronin, Street of Shame) bathes much of the film in darkness and shadow, casting an eerie glow over the unrelentingly melodramatic narrative. Tanaka, who appeared in fifteen of Mizoguchi’s films and also became the second Japanese woman director (Love Letter, Love Under the Crucifix), gives a subtly compelling performance as Oharu, one of the most tragic figures in the history of cinema. Winner of the International Prize at the 1952 Venice International Film Festival, The Life of Oharu is screening December 18 and January 6 in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama,” which also features works Teuvo Tulio, Fei Mu, George Kuchar, Todd Haynes, Wong Kar Wai, Terence Davies, Leos Carax, Wu Yonggang, Robert Stevenson, and many more.
Letty Mason (Lillian Gish) is being driven crazy by internal and external sources in The Wind
THE WIND (Victor Sjöström, 1928)
December 19, 8:30 www.filmlinc.org
Victor Sjöström’s 1928 now-classic silent film The Wind stars Lillian Gish as Letty Mason, a young woman traveling from Virginia to Texas to live with her cousin Beverly (Edward Earle). Traveling from the cultured, civilized East to what was still the wild West, the uncertain Letty must confront the fierceness of nature head-on — both human nature and the harsh natural environment. On the train, she is wooed by cattleman Wirt Roddy (Montagu Love), but her fears grow as she first sees the vicious wind howling outside the train window the closer she gets to her destination. Once in Sweetwater, she is picked up by her cousin’s neighbors, the handsome Lige Hightower (Lars Hanson), and his goofy sidekick, Sourdough (William Orlamond). Both men take a quick liking to Letty, who seems most attracted to Wirt. Soon Beverly’s wife, Cora (Dorothy Cumming, in her next-to-last film before retiring), becomes jealous of Letty’s closeness with her husband and kids and kicks her out, leaving a desperate Letty to make choices she might not be ready for as the wind outside becomes fiercer and ever-more dangerous. The Wind is a tour de force for Gish in her last silent movie, not only because of her emotionally gripping portrayal of Letty but because she put the entire production together, obtaining the rights to the novel by Dorothy Scarborough, hiring the Swedish director and star Hanson, and arguing over the ending with the producers and Irving Thalberg. (Unfortunately, she lost on that account, just about the only thing that did not go the way she wanted.)
Letty Mason (Lillian Gish) and Lige Hightower (Lars Hanson) have some tough decisions to make in Victor Sjöström’s silent classic
Sjöström (The Phantom Carriage, The Divine Woman), who played Professor Isak Borg in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, and cinematographer John Arnold create some dazzling effects as a twister threatens and Letty battles both inside and outside; she is regularly shot from the side, at the door of the shack where she lives, not knowing if she’d be safer inside or outside as the wind and sand blast over her. The film, an early look at climate change, was shot in the Mojave Desert in difficult circumstances; to get the wind to swirl, the crew used propellers from eight airplanes. Dialogue is sparse, and the story is told primarily in taut visuals. A restored 35mm print of The Wind with the original music and effects soundtrack is screening December 19 in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama.”
Wu Yonggang’s directorial debut, The Goddess, made for Lianhua Film Company after he worked as a designer for the Shaw brothers, is a socially conscious, emotive tale about one woman’s struggle to give her young son a better life than her own. The seventy-three-minute silent film opens with a series of shots by cinematographer Hong Weilie that follows the evening light, from the setting sun to a man on a ladder lighting a street corner oil lamp to an apartment window seen from the outside. Wu then cuts to inside the room, revealing a dressing table with lots of makeup, then a pair of dresses hanging on the wall, and a doll. The camera next rises from an empty basket on the floor to a nervous woman (Ruan Lingyu) cradling a baby. She looks at a clock; it is time for her to leave her child and walk the streets of the city to make money. It’s a melancholy scene in a melancholy film, but the unnamed prostitute is no mere hooker with a heart of gold; she is a determined yet fragile woman who will do anything for her son, Shuiping (Keng Li). Running from the police, she is helped by Zhang (Zhang Zhizhi), a low-level gangster who decides to become her pimp, regularly taking her money and threatening her future, and that of her son’s. Whenever she attempts to raise her station, particularly when she saves enough money to send Shuiping to private school, there is always something that brings her back down.
Forget about It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street, and endless versions of A Christmas Carol; our favorite holiday movie is Douglas Sirk’s sensationally strange and beautiful All That Heaven Allows, which you can see December 13 and January 1 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s four-week, fifty-four-movie, get-out-your-handkerchiefs series 
We used to think that Aki Kaurismäki’s 
