twi-ny recommended events

NEW YORK ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL OPENING NIGHT: BAD GENIUS

Lynn (Chutimon Cheungcharoensukying) keeps looking over her shoulder as a cheating scandal gets serious in Bad Genius

BAD GENIUS (CHALARD GAMES GONG) (Nattawut Poonpiriya, 2017)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Friday, June 30, 7:00
Festival runs June 30 – July 16
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org
www.subwaycinema.com

The sixteenth annual New York Asian Film Festival gets under way June 30 with writer-director Nattawut Poonpiriya’s big Thai hit, Bad Genius. The amazingly smart Lynn (NYAFF 2017 Screen International Rising Star Award winner Chutimon Cheungcharoensukying) switches schools for an opportunity to win a coveted scholarship and go to a better college, with the help of her father, a respected teacher (Thaneth Warakulnukroh). She quickly becomes besties with the popular Grace (Eisaya Hosuwan), who is dating snobby rich kid Pat (Teeradon Supapunpinyo). Lynn mentors Grace, who is not a very good student, and is then hired by Pat’s wealthy father (Sahajak Boonthanakit) to tutor his son to improve his low grades. Soon Grace, Pat, and several of Pat’s other friends (Vittawin Veeravidhayanant, Suwijak Mahatthanachotwanich, Narwin Rathlertkarn, Thanawat Sutat Na Ayutthaya, and Thanachart Phinyocheep) are paying substantial money to Lynn, who has devised unique ways to cheat on multiple-choice tests. As she and Bank (Chanon Santinatornkul), another smart scholarship student — whose parents (Uraiwan Puvichitsutin and Somchai Ruedikunrangsi) run a small laundry, which embarrasses him and drives him to improve his, and their, lot — compete for a prestigious Singapore scholarship, lies, betrayal, greed, and deception lead to major troubles for everyone as the crucial standardized STIC tests approach.

Bank (Chanon Santinatornkul) and Lynn (Chutimon Cheungcharoensukying) face a terrifying future in Nattawut Poonpiriya’s Bad Genius

Over the last ten years, such YA books and movies as Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy and Veronica Roth’s Divergent series have turned teen angst over the SATs and college admissions into futuristic dystopian nightmares, but with Bad Genius, Poonpiriya’s second film — his debut, Countdown, was part of the 2013 NYAFF — takes a much more straightforward and honest approach to the fears kids experience when faced with taking tests that could impact the rest of their lives. In her film debut, Cheungcharoensukying reveals a subtle depth as Lynn, a brainiac who just wants to be accepted by her peers, while also insisting on excelling at everything she does (including cheating) and helping her divorced father with expenses. She knows exactly what she’s doing, understanding it is wrong, and she can’t stop, but it’s not only about the money. Aside from a few silly scenes and the occasional use of overly dramatic license, Poonpiriya mostly avoids genre clichés as the two-hour Bad Genius evolves into a genuine thriller with a fab chase scene, cleverly keeping the audience on the edge of their seats with unexpected twists and turns. It’s both a primer on how to cheat and how to deal with potentially getting caught. The opening-night selection of the NYAFF, Bad Genius is screening on June 30 at 7:00 at the Walter Reade Theater and will be followed by a Q&A with Nattawut “Baz” Poonpiriya, Chanon Santinatornkul, and Chutimon “Aokbab” Chuengcharoensukying and an after-party. The festival, which runs through July 16 at Lincoln Center and the SVA Theatre, consists of more than fifty films from China, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia, including a surprise twenty-fifth anniversary screening of a 1992 classic.

JEFF KOONS: SEATED BALLERINA

Jeff Koons’s “Seated Ballerina” has extended her stay at Rockefeller Center through July 5 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

30 Rockefeller Plaza
49th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Extended through July 5, free
www.rockefellercenter.com
seated ballerina slideshow
www.artproductionfund.org

In 2000, controversial American artist Jeff Koons placed “Puppy,” a forty-three-foot-high stainless-steel sculpture of a dog covered in tens of thousands of flowering plants, in the plaza at Rockefeller Center, a work that Koons called a symbol of “love, warmth, and happiness.” In 2014, he installed at the same spot the thirty-seven-foot-high stainless-steel “Split-Rocker,” part toy pony, part dinosaur, also covered in flowering plants. And now Koons, who also had a major retrospective at the Whitney in 2014, has brought “Seated Ballerina” to Rockefeller Plaza, a forty-five-foot-high inflatable tchotchke that would feel at home in the Thanksgiving Day Parade. Inspired by a smaller piece from his “Antiquity” series, the sculpture, which recalls his balloon dogs and is sponsored by the Art Production Fund and Kiehl’s, is based on a porcelain figure by Oksana Zhnikrup, who created statuettes for the Kiev Experimental Ceramic-Art Factory beginning in 1955. Koons’s nylon ballerina, which is supposed to reference a modern-day Venus while also raising awareness for the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children, is sitting on a tuffet, leaning over to her left and adjusting one of her ballet slippers. In the wind, she slowly rocks back and forth, her left arm in motion, strings holding her in place. (On days with severe weather she is deflated, only to rise up again on balmier times in shining gold, silver, red, and blue.) Although the signs say she will remain in Rockefeller Center through June 5, her stay has been extended until July 5, so there’s still time to catch her. As with so much of Koons’s oeuvre, what you see is pretty much what you get; some people love it, some hate it; some find it plagiaristic art lacking originality, while others consider it an entertaining bit of artistic appropriation, one of the foundations of Koons’s practice. In any case, it certainly attracts attention, both up close as well as from a distance, where “Seated Ballerina” hovers over Paul Manship’s monumental sculpture of Prometheus in the light-up fountain below. “I hope the installation of ‘Seated Ballerina’ at Rockefeller Center offers a sense of affirmation and excitement to the viewer to reach their potential,” Koons said in a statement. “The aspect of reflectivity emulates life’s energy; it’s about contemplation and what it means to be a human being. It’s a very hopeful piece.”

TWI-NY TALK: JODY OBERFELDER — THE BRAIN PIECE

Jody Oberfelder Projects will present The Brain Piece at New York Live Arts June 28 – July 1 (photo by Christopher Duggan)

JODY OBERFELDER PROJECTS: THE BRAIN PIECE
New York Live Arts
219 West 19th St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Wednesday, June 28, gala benefit $200, 7:30
June 29 – July 1, $25-$35, 7:00 & 9:00
212-691-6500
newyorklivearts.org
www.jodyoberfelder.com

New York-based director, choreographer, dancer, and filmmaker Jody Oberfelder’s The Brain Piece, premiering at New York Live Arts June 28 – July 1, continues her exploration of our internal organs, following on her extraordinary 2013 piece, 4Chambers, an immersive, multimedia, interactive journey inside the human heart. Performed by Oberfelder, Mary Madsen, Pierre Guilbault, and Hannah Wendel along with ten dancer docents, The Brain Piece is divided into two parts, “Mind Matters / Head Space” and “World of Brain,” combining film, visual art, installation, dance, music, and text for an audience limited to 72 members. The cerebral, multimedia piece includes her award-winning short film Dance of the Neurons, made with Eric Siegel, which turns firing synapses into a colorful, joyous dance. Oberfelder, a travel and yoga enthusiast and former lead singer of the punk band the Bagdads, founded Jody Oberfelder Projects in 1989 and has previously presented such works as The Titles Comes Last, Moved, Re:Dress, and Throb. The charming, gregarious, always energetic creator took a break from rehearsals to tell twi-ny all about The Brain Piece.

twi-ny: We recently bumped into each other at the Whitney Biennial, where you were serving as a docent for Asad Raza’s “Root sequence. Mother tongue,” an installation of living trees paired with specific objects, one of which you contributed. As museumgoers made their way through the exhibit, I couldn’t help but think of it as a kind of improvisatory dance with nature, especially with you there. What was that experience like?

jody oberfelder: We’re actually called caregivers. The people who pass through sometimes don’t know we’re positioned as such as we, as you describe, do this improvisatory dance with people in conversation. The show has been up since March and we’ve seen the trees go from bare, to blossom, to leafing, and now they can’t wait to get planted outside. Many people have passed through. Asad’s work balances organic, inorganic, and human all in the space. Having a person in the room is as important as the trees and the caregiver’s placed object. I’m learning that conversation is often this invisible thread that links things together in the present.

twi-ny: Your work is very scientific; were you interested in science when you were a kid?

jo: I would not say I grew up with a scientific bent. I had a fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Dowd, who explained the digestive system with panache (“…and out the other end” — we were all snickering). I’ve come to science through the body, and through a curiosity about what makes us alive. There is a beautiful ecosystem within us and a giant cosmos outside of us. Did you ever see that film by Charles and Ray Eames — Powers of Ten — it’s all about zooming out and zooming in. That, to me, is what science is about. Things can be very specific and very vast.

twi-ny: Yes, Powers of Ten is quite eye-opening. How did you find/choose your science collaborators — Dr. Wei Ji Ma, Cecilia Fontanesi, and Ed Lein — and what did each one bring to The Brain Piece?

Word of mouth.

Cecilia is a dancer and a neuroscientist. She met one of my dancers, Mary Madsen, at a party. I loved talking with her from the very beginning. The thing she said, “The brain is everywhere in the body,” totally clicked with my premise of dancers illuminating brain life.

Wendy Suzuki, who helped illuminate the brain-body connection for me, introduced Wei Ji to me. Wei Ji has been a great collaborator. He comes to rehearsals to “fact check” and advise. He’s in Dance of the Neurons. I audited his class at NYU on illusion. We did a combo lecture / performance in Amsterdam.

Another neuroscientist introduced Ed Lein to me: Gary Marcus. My company manager at the time, Clare Cook, was giving him private Pilates lessons. Gary and I had several conversations, which culminated in him saying, “You know, you should meet Ed from the Allen Institute for Brain Science. He specializes in the biology of neurons.” Ed and I had a back and forth on a kind of Skype sketchpad, and he drew little pictures of how neurons are formed that eventually became the literal storyboard for Dance of the Neurons. I embellished, of course, and played with all the ways neurons “dance” and form synaptic connection. I’m most grateful to these scientists, who are also artists.

twi-ny: Without giving too much away, how will the physical space of New York Live Arts come into play? Only the second half will take place in the theater on a proscenium stage, correct?

jo: It’s my hope that there really is no separation between the sections, that the more experience-based portions of the work continue to inform the world of the brain in the theater. There are nine films in part two. When you go to movies, you don’t question that the actors are not that big. I think the problem with live theater is that we’re in a long shot for too long. I’m creating an atmosphere of a giant brain with moving parts. I think this is the nature of brain plasticity: zoom in for close-ups, see what the alignment of neurons are doing at this time, how we’re constantly in a perceptual loop.

Jody Oberfelder served as a caregiver for Asad Raza’s “Root sequence. Mother tongue” at the Whitney Biennial (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Jody Oberfelder served as a caregiver at the Whitney Biennial (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

twi-ny: 4Chambers involved a significant amount of interaction, at one point bringing the audience into physical contact with the dancers. Will there be anything similar in The Brain Piece?

jo: You’ll see.

twi-ny: Good answer. I only recently learned that the doctor who performed the autopsy on Albert Einstein actually removed his brain and brought it home to study. What is the most unusual thing you learned about the brain while making this piece?

jo: That the brain is a noisy place and we’re constantly trying to figure things out and make sense of the world. And that our bodies are the vehicles for us to sensorially enter the world. Ask a neuroscientist to define “mind” and they have no clear thing to pin down. There were philosophers, then psychiatrists, and now great discoveries in seeing the pictures in the brain, seeing what makes things go off, decay, or become more plastic, make connections: That’s the dance of neurons. But the mind — it’s like vapor. We breathe in present and past. It’s in constant motion. And dancers are the perfect vehicles to convey this movement.

twi-ny: How have the two works brought the heart and the mind together for you?

jo: The heart leads to the mind. When working on 4Chambers, I interviewed Wendy, who talked about the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system and how all the way down from our brains our hearts operate. We feel our hearts, but it’s triggered by the mind. You know how what your brain is doing by what your heart is doing, and vice versa. “I can put my hand on your heart and feel your heartbeat, but if I put my hand on your skull, I can’t feel your thoughts.”

twi-ny: Regarding Dance of the Neurons, your choreography has always been very cinematic, and The Brain Piece includes that short film, which has been garnering prizes at festivals. How do you see the two disciplines merging in your work?

jo: Thank you. Someone at a festival said I was a filmic choreographer. I like that. I’m pretty visual. Like a filmmaker, I’m in the business of arranging time and space and hidden narrative. I use a lot of improvisation around ideas and look for dancers who can take the ball and run with it. I like to think that if I give the performers imaginative tasks, the content will form, and it’s my job as a director and choreographer to prepare for a rehearsal with a loose storyboard of possibilities, then go deeply inside the physical investigation for the interaction with audience members, the films, and the onstage content. Devising content is a matter of honing in on what feels right.

I worked with a wonderful dramaturg this time around: Jessica Applebaum. The piece has had many renderings. She helped me not be afraid of the complexity of the subject matter and to go forward making. Details and big picture always in mind. Jessica has also left me a lot of space these last months to figure it out on my own. Today our neuroscientist, Wei Ji, was there to see me finish the finale in our last moments of our last rehearsal!

I love it now. I’m even surprised by it.

twi-ny: I’m very much looking forward to being surprised by it as well. This might be an obvious closing question, but now with the heart and the brain covered, do you anticipate continuing to explore the mind-body connection with different organs as the focus?

jo: The sex organs will probably be combined with the guts. Like when you feel something in your gut. Intuition. Power.

SOUTHERN GOTHIC: THE BEGUILED

Clint Eastwood in The Beguiled

THE BEGUILED (Donald Siegel, 1971)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
June 26-30
Series runs June 26 – July 11
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

In conjunction with the theatrical release of Sofia Coppola’s remake of The Beguiled, which earned her the Best Director award at Cannes, BAMcinématek is hosting the sixteen-film series “Southern Gothic,” which begins with, appropriately enough, Don Siegel’s twisted 1971 original, based on Thomas P. Cullinan’s 1966 novel, A Painted Devil. On the outskirts of Mississippi, Union corporal John “McB” McBurney is seriously wounded and found in the woods by twelve-year-old Amy (Pamelyn Ferdin), who has been gathering mushrooms for dinner. The hirsute hunk is brought to Mrs. Farnsworth’s Seminary for Young Ladies to convalesce before Martha Farnsworth (Geraldine Page) turns him over to the Confederates. (The film was shot at the Ashland-Belle Helene Plantation in Louisiana.) Confined to bed until he starts getting around on crutches, McB becomes an object of romantic interest to several of the girls and women in the house, including the kindhearted Edwina (Elizabeth Hartman), who is about to become a partner in the school; the innocent Amy, who compares the wounded soldier to an injured crow; the devilishly wicked Carol (Jo Ann Harris); and Martha herself, who has been running the school and former farm by herself since the death of her beloved brother. Also intrigued by McB’s presence are young students Abigail (Melody Thomas), Lizzie (Peggy Drier), and Janie (Pattye Mattick) while Doris (Darleen Carr) doesn’t understand why they’re all helping the enemy and considers turning him in. The only one seeing the situation clearly is the slave Hallie (blues singer Mae Mercer), who discusses the concept of freedom with the corporal — who is not quite the heroic, Jesus-like figure the girls think he is — in one of the film’s most intelligent scenes. It all reaches its apex one crazy night, setting up quite a finale.

The Beguiled was the third of five movies Siegel (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Killers) made with Eastwood, after 1968’s Coogan’s Bluff and 1970’s Two Mules for Sister Sarah and before 1971’s Dirty Harry and 1979’s Escape from Alcatraz. It is both a feminist and sexist fantasy that is more than a little bit creepy; the original trailer referred to the females at Mrs. Farnsworth’s seminary as “man-eager girls.” The film also deals with patriotism and treason, incest and pedophilia, trust and lies, first love and sexual jealousy, and a sadomasochistic ideals of pleasure and pain that relates to the painting on Mrs. Farnsworth’s bedroom wall, Sandro Botticelli’s late-fifteenth-century “Lamentation over the Dead Christ.” Six-time Oscar nominee and Emmy and Grammy winner Lalo Schifrin’s score is all over the place, from Baroque and Renaissance music to twentieth-century melodrama and horror; in addition, an offscreen Eastwood himself mumbles the antiwar theme song, “The Dove She Is a Pretty Bird,” heard at the beginning and end of the film. Eastwood is at his stern best in The Beguiled, while Emmy and Oscar winner Page (Interiors, The Trip to Bountiful) is elegantly fragile and Oscar nominee Hartman (A Patch of Blue, Walking Tall) is achingly virginal. (The two women also costarred in Francis Ford Coppola’s underseen You’re a Big Boy Now.) The film, both a love story and a revenge thriller that is very possibly a likely influence on Stephen King’s Misery, constantly borders on misogyny but manages to raise the issue more than exploit it by the grisly end. It’s an extremely strange movie, one of the oddest ever made about the Civil War, and, as the title warns, absolutely beguiling. The Beguiled is screening June 26-30 at BAM; “Southern Gothic” continues through July 11 with such other films as Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou, John Huston’s Wise Blood, Andrei Konchalovsky’s Shy People, Robert Aldrich’s Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and Luis Buñuel’s The Young One.

THE TRAVELING LADY

Slim (Larry Bull), Mrs. Mavis (Lynn Cohen), and Judge Robedaux (George Morfogen) discuss local matters in Horton Foote’s The Traveling Lade (photo by Carol Rosegg)

HORTON FOOTE’S THE TRAVELING LADY
Cherry Lane Mainstage Theatre
38 Commerce St.
Tuesday – Sunday through July 30, $65-$95 ($39-$49 with code TTLRED)
212-989-2020
www.cherrylanetheatre.org

Austin Pendleton’s revival of Horton Foote’s 1954 Broadway play, The Traveling Lady, is essentially a simple little diversion, a gentle, bittersweet slice-of-life drama that is singularly American. The show, which opened Thursday night at the Cherry Lane, takes place in a small town in Foote’s home state of Texas, where he set most of his works, including the Tony-nominated The Trip to Bountiful, the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Young Man from Atlanta, the Orphans’ Home Cycle, and the trio of shorts that make up Harrison, TX. It’s 1950, and folks are gathering in Clara Breedlove’s (Angelina Fiordellisi) quaint backyard (designed by Harry Feiner, who also did the lighting). Stopping by on the day of Miss Kate Dawson’s funeral are Mrs. Mavis (Lynn Cohen), a cranky old lady who enjoys torturing her daughter, the kindhearted Sitter Mavis (Karen Ziemba); Judge Robedaux (George Morfogen), a frail, elderly man who doesn’t mind a bit of gossip here and there; Mrs. Tillman (Jill Tanner), a fanatical Bible-thumping teetotaler who brings in reclamation projects to cure them of the evil ills of drink and crime; the friendly Clara, who welcomes the company; and Clara’s brother, Slim Murray (Larry Bull), a hardworking, soft-spoken man who has recently been widowed. Arriving on this hot day is Georgette Thomas (Jean Lichty) and her young daughter, Margaret Rose (Korinne Tetlow), who have ridden the bus all night and are looking for a place to live while waiting for her husband, Henry (PJ Sosko), to get out of prison. But she is surprised to discover that he has already been freed and is working for Mrs. Tillman, who is determined to reform him. But that’s a whole lot easier said than done.

Sitter Mavis (Karen Ziemba), her mother (Lynn Cohen), and Henry Thomas (PJ Sosko) hang out in Clara Breedlove’s yard in Austin Pendleton production at the Cherry Lane (photo by)

A collaboration between Cherry Lane Theatre’s Founder’s Project and La Femme Theatre Productions to celebrate the centennial of Foote’s birth — the playwright was born in 1916 and passed away in 2009 at the age of ninety-two — The Traveling Lady is a creaky, old-fashioned tale of a more simpler time in America, a story that shows its age. Pendleton (A Day by the Sea, A Taste of Honey), one of the busiest off-Broadway directors around, has several characters enter and leave via the narrow Cherry Lane aisle, which is probably supposed to make the audience feel more a part of the atmosphere but instead becomes overused relatively quickly while also confusing the geography of the location. Cohen (I Remember Mama, Big Love), who also portrayed Mrs. Mavis in a 2006 revival at Ensemble Studio Theater, is wonderfully nasty as the ornery old soul, who might not be quite as doddering as she sometimes likes to appear. “Yep. I remember all of it. I remember everything that happened in this town,” she says. Bull (The Coast of Utopia, Rocket to the Moon) is strong and solid as Slim, a man’s man who is unable to share his true feelings. Tony winner Ziemba (Contact, Steel Pier), Tanner (Dividing the Estate, Enchanted April), and Cherry Lane founding artistic director Fiordellisi (Out of the Mouths of Babes, Catch the Butcher) are fine as the chatty women, but there is little chemistry between Sosko (Row After Row, Reentry) and Lichty (Nora, A Loss of Roses); of course, their characters have not seen each other for a long time, but the audience is unlikely to care whether they get back together or not. Lichty, who cofounded Le Femme with Pendleton and Robert Dohmen, fares better as the sensitive mother, but Sosko is hampered by Henry’s desire to form a band, a subplot that goes nowhere. Foote, who won screenwriting Oscars for To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies, instills the hundred-minute intermissionless The Traveling Lady with some charming moments, but there are not quite enough of them to sustain this production above being a nice, pleasurable detour.

LAST CHANCE — A WORLD OF EMOTIONS: ANCIENT GREECE, 700 BC – 200 AD

“A World of Emotions” takes a unique approach to Greek antiquities (photo courtesy the Onassis Cultural Center)

Onassis Cultural Center
Olympic Tower
645 Fifth Ave. at 51st St.
Saturday, June 24, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
onassisusa.org

Saturday is the last day to see the outstanding exhibition “A World of Emotions: Ancient Greece, 700 BC – 200 AD,” at the Onassis Cultural Center in Olympic Tower in Midtown. “The Greeks were not the first people who felt something; they were not the first who wrote literature or created art because they felt something. But they were the first who made emotions the subject of their literature and their art,” curator Angelos Chaniotis says on the audio tour. The show consists of more than 125 archaic and classical works dating back nearly three thousand years, from statues, coins, and vases to masks, amulets, and a painting that portrays a surprising depth of field. The exhibition is divided into ten categories and subcategories, including “The Art of Emotions,” “Spaces of Emotions,” “Enslaved by Emotions,” “The Battlefield,” “The Cemetery: Space of Grief and Hope,” and “Medea,” and features small monitors with excerpts from mythological poems and tales. The works depict romance and murder, joy and sorrow, relating stories about Apollo, Artemis, Agamemnon, Iphigenia, Zeus, Herakles, Leda and the Swan, Penthesileia, and others. There’s also a clip from Yukio Ninagawa’s modern all-male staging of Euripides’ Medea. Looking at ancient Greek artworks can be cold and distant, but Chaniotis’s approach brings a warmth and sense of humor to a collection that boasts numerous treasures from the Onassis Cultural Center, the Acropolis Museum, the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, the Louvre, the British Museum, and the Vatican Museums, among others. Be sure not to miss the stele of the man and his beloved pig.

BERTRAND TAVERNIER: MY JOURNEY THROUGH FRENCH CINEMA

Bertrand Tavernier looks back at his life and career by analyzing French cinema in thrilling documentary

Bertrand Tavernier looks back at his life and career by analyzing French cinema in unique ways in thrilling documentary

MY JOURNEY THROUGH FRENCH CINEMA (Bertrand Tavernier, 2016)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, June 23
212-255-2243
cohenmedia.net
quadcinema.com

Auteur and film historian Bertrand Tavernier takes viewers on a fascinating, deeply personal trip into the world of early French movies in the extraordinary My Journey through French Cinema. Inspired by Martin Scorsese’s 1995 A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies and 1999 My Voyage to Italy, the French auteur recounts how he believes that going to the theater as a child helped him survive a serious illness and led to a lifelong love of cinema; he even battled and beat cancer while making this documentary. In more than three hours that fly by surprisingly quickly, Tavernier examines dozens and dozens of French films, not looking at them as a historian or a fan but as a fellow director; in addition, the film unfolds neither chronologically nor thematically but in a delightfully charming stream of consciousness as Tavernier shares personal anecdotes that lead him from film to film and director to director. He begins by describing the first movie that had a major impact on him, Jacques Becker’s Dernier Atout, and moves on to his days working with Volker Schlöndorff for Jean-Pierre Melville, who thought he was a terrible assistant and turned him into a publicist; Tavernier also wrote for Les Cahiers du cinema and Positif. Through voiceover and onscreen appearances, Tavernier spends a lot of time discussing Melville (Bob le flambeur, Le Doulos) and Claude Sautet (Classe tous risques), whom he considers his cinematic godfathers; Becker (Casque d’Or, Le Trou); Jean Renoir (A Day in the Country, Rules of the Game); Marcel Carné (Le jour se lève, Hôtel du Nord); Jean-Luc Godard (Contempt, Pierrot le fou); composers Maurice Jaubert (Port of Shadows, L’Atalante) and Joseph Kosma (Le Chat, House on the Waterfront); and actors Jean Gabin (La Bȇte Humaine, Grand Illusion) and Eddie Constantine (Alphaville, Cet homme est dangereux). Also garnering significant mention are Jean Sacha, Gilles Grangier, Henri Decoin, Jean Delannoy, Edmond T. Gréville, Lino Ventura, and Pierre Schoendoerffer.

What makes My Journey through French Cinema so special is that Tavernier, who has made such films as The Clockmaker, Coup de Torchon, and ’Round Midnight, approaches his subjects from the point of view of a director, examining camera angles, sound, script writing, music, dialogue, and performance; it’s not so much a crash course as a master class that only Tavernier could give, adding insightful stories of his vast experience in the industry, alongside archival footage of some of the people he is discussing. And oh, the clips; there are hundreds of scenes of well-known and under-the-radar films that fans are going to want to revisit or see for the first time after watching Tavernier wax eloquent about their subtle joys. (Be aware: He sometimes goes right to the ending.) “I would like this film to be an expression of gratitude to all those filmmakers, screenwriters, actors, and musicians who have erupted into my life,” Tavernier notes in a statement. “Memory keeps us warm: This film is a piece of glowing charcoal for a winter night.” In the documentary itself, he pays tribute to “filmmakers who believe that movies could change things a bit, who believed, as Renoir told me one day, you have to make a film thinking that you’ll change the course of history. But you also must be humble enough to think, if you touch two people, you’ve done something extraordinary.” In My Journey through French Cinema, Tavernier has done something extraordinary indeed here, becoming “what every French creator should be: a French ambassador to France,” as his mentor Melville once said to him of Jean Cocteau. And like Scorsese, Tavernier is a film preservationist; because of the documentary, many of these old works are now being restored. My Journey opens June 23 at the Quad, with Tavernier participating in a Q&A after the 4:45 show on June 24. The Quad is also presenting “Tavernier Treasures,” four films selected by Tavernier by other directors, as well as “Film & Nothing But: Bertrand Tavernier,” a retrospective that continues through June 29. Tavernier will be at many of the screenings to talk about the works. (And there’s more to come, as Tavernier is making an eight-hour series for French television that continues his cinematic adventure.)