twi-ny recommended events

SCREEN SLATE PRESENTS — THE MEDIUM IS THE MASSACRE: DEMON SEED

Julie Christie is trapped in a suburban nightmare in Donald Cammell’s DEMON SEED

DEMON SEED (Donald Cammell, 1977)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Sunday, November 6, 3:00, and Tuesday, November 8, 9:00
Series runs through November 13
212-505-5181
anthologyfilmarchives.org

In his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan declared, “In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium — that is, of any extension of ourselves — result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.” Screen Slate and Anthology Film Archives have teamed up on a series that shows that concept at work in a very specific way. Continuing through November 13, “Screen Slate Presents: The Medium Is the Massacre” consists of a dozen horror films and specially chosen shorts that ratchet up the fear factor using cutting-edge technology and new media. Based on the novel by Dean R. Koontz, Donald Cammell’s creepy, claustrophobic 1977 futuristic thriller Demon Seed offers a very different look at motherhood. The film stars a surprisingly game Julie Christie as Susan Harris, a frustrated housewife whose husband, Alex (Fritz Weaver), is the leader of a team that has built a master computer known as Proteus (voiced by Robert Vaughn). When Alex goes off for several months to further Proteus’s already impressive attributes, the supercomputer starts developing a mind of its own, locking Susan in the house and deciding she must give birth to its child.

Cammell, who codirected Performance with Nicolas Roeg, fills Demon Seed with trippy, psychedelic visuals (the fab animated sequence is by Jordan Belson and Bo Gehring with Ron Hays) and cool technological flourishes, along with an electronic score by Ian Underwood and Lee Ritenour supplementing Jerry Fielding’s central musical themes. The film delves into suburban paranoia with Toffler-esque flare and an Orwellian fear of artificial intelligence. The film harkens back to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Joseph Sargent’s Colossus: The Forbin Project while influencing such future films as John Badham’s WarGames, which also names its supercomputer “Joshua” and casts Weaver look-alike John Wood as computer creator Dr. Stephen Falken. Demon Seed is screening with Ericka Beckman’s 1999 experimental short Hiatus and Soda_Jerk’s one-minute Undaddy Mainframe on November 6 and 8 at Anthology. “Demon Seed with video effects by Ron Hays was perhaps the first film to integrate video with other special effect film processes,” Denise Gallant wrote in a 1982 issue of American Cinematographer. Programmed by Jon Dieringer of Screen Slate, “The Medium Is the Massacre” continues through November 13 with such other tech-savvy frightfests as David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (Cronenberg was directly influenced by McLuhan, who lectured at the university he attended), John Flynn’s Brainscan, Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse, each accompanied by at least one related short film. “Whenever the dragon’s teeth of technological change are sown, we reap a whirlwind of violence,” McLuhan also said, in a March 1969 Playboy interview.

KINGS OF WAR

Henry V (Ramsey Nasr) doesn’t take kindly to French threats in Ivo van Hove’s KINGS OF WAR (photo by Richard Termine)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave.
November 3-6, $30-$130
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
tga.nl/en

If you’ve ever wondered just what all the fuss is about Ivo van Hove, then hustle over to BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House and see the Dutch-based Belgian theater director’s latest wonder, Kings of War. A follow-up of sorts to Roman Tragedies, van Hove’s five-and-a-half-hour merging of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus that played at BAM in November 2012, Kings of War seamlessly combines the Bard’s Henry V, Henry VI Parts I, II, and III, and Richard III into a dazzling four-and-a-half-hour multimedia extravaganza. The Toneelgroep Amsterdam production opens with a projection on a video screen of every English king or queen starting with Queen Elizabeth II and going backward to Henry IV, immediately linking the past to the present. Jan Versweyveld’s set and An D’Huys’s costumes bring them together further, with the characters dressed in contemporary clothing — the men in suits, the women in dresses, pantsuits, and heels — while the stage, inspired by Winston Churchill’s WWII War Room, features modern computers and old television monitors playing scenes from war movies. Translated into Dutch by Rob Klinkenberg and freely adapted by Bart van den Eynde and Peter van Kraaij, the play focuses on the kings and their thirst, or lack thereof, for power and the awesome responsibility they take on when deciding to go to war or not, exploring the psychological battles going on inside their head. Henry V (Ramsey Nasr) becomes a fast learner as he attempts to negotiate with the dauphin of France (Robert de Hoog) and his liaison (Chris Nietvelt) to prevent a war, but soon he is claiming the hand of Katharina (Hélène Devos) from her father, Charles VI (Leon Voorberg), in order to establish peace. Henry VI (Eelco Smits) is not quite as successful, a whimpering coward who does not want to be king; his feeble wooing of Margareta (Janni Goslinga) is hysterical. And then comes the dastardly Richard III, portrayed with a captivating bravado by Hans Kesting, sporting a hump and an ugly birthmark on his face; his bold pursuit to marry Lady Anne (Devos) after having just killed her beloved husband is utterly thrilling.

Henry VI (Eelco Smits) is not quite up to being king in four-and-a-half-hour extravaganza (photo by Richard Termine)

In a program note, van Hove, who recently directed the back-to-back Arthur Miller plays A View from the Bridge and The Crucible on Broadway and the David Bowie / Enda Walsh collaboration Lazarus at New York Theatre Workshop, explains, “It is fascinating to witness how crucial decisions about life and death are made. This play shows man at his most noble and at his most perverse. . . . It is inspiring to discover Shakespeare as a contemporary who is dealing with the type of events we see on the news every day: the dark machinations of the people in power and the violence that their decisions bring about.” Also inspiring is van Hove’s brilliant staging. The War Room changes with each new king, who is crowned in a stylistic manner as a brass band (Konstantin Koev, Charlotte van Passen, Daniel Quiles Cascant, Daniel Ruibal Ortigueir) plays and contratenor Steve Dugardin sings. The back of the set leads to morgue-like white corridors where various men meet their fate; the behind-the-scenes action is shown live on a large screen divided into rectangular grids, as a cameraman roams across the stage, getting up close and personal with the characters. (The video is by Tal Yarden.) It’s particularly effective during the spectacular Richard III section; as the king tries to convince the widowed Lady Anne that he is in love with her, her dead husband can be seen both on the screen as well as at the very back, on a gurney, his presence looming over them. Later, when Richard examines himself in a full-size mirror, the multiple images are breathtaking as van Hove reveals the villain’s many faces.

Richard III (Hans Kesting) takes a strange path in wooing Lady Anne (Hélène Devos) in Ivo van Hove epic at BAM (photo by Richard Termine)

Most members of the terrific cast play multiple roles, with Nasr as Henry V and Richmond, Eelco Smits as Henry VI and Grey, Bart Siegers as Edward IV, York, and Henry V’s chief of staff, Leon Voorberg as Charles VI, Warwick, and Stanley, Aus Greidanus Jr. as Gloucester and Buckingham, and de Hoog as the dauphin, Suffolk, and Clarence. The language has been modernized, which might at first bother Shakespeare purists, especially when reference is made to the current political situation in America, but that’s yet another way van Hove fuses the past with the present, as the fight for supremacy in the corridors of power is, of course, timeless and universal. (Thus, the ticking of metronomes as the finale approaches.) The nearly 270 minutes, with one intermission, fly by fairly quickly, as the play hits all the high notes at a gripping pace, zeroing in on deaths and coronations. Van Hove excels at adaptations, preferring them to new works; the Obie and Tony winner has previously been at BAM with Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, John Cassavetes’s Opening Night, and Sophocles’s Antigone, in addition to Roman Tragedies, continually coming up with remarkably innovative ways to tell stories, taking audiences to places they have never been before. Kings of War is another grand triumph, a staggering achievement from a true creative genius.

PETER AND THE FARM

Peter Dunning reflects back on his hard life in Tony Stone documentary

PETER AND THE FARM (Tony Stone, 2016)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Opens Friday, November 4
212-660-0312
www.peterandthefarmfilm.com
metrograph.com

“There’s not a part of this farm that has not been scattered with my sweat, my piss, my blood, my spit, my tears, fingernails, skin, and hair,” Peter Dunning says in Tony Stone’s Peter and the Farm. Dunning and Stone essentially show all that and more in the intimate documentary, holding nothing back, resulting in a film that is often difficult to watch, following a crotchety, suicidal, alcoholic sixty-nine-year-old organic meat farmer with a mangled hand who is estranged from his family and runs his 187-acre Vermont farm seemingly by himself. “I’m living in hell,” he says with cold detachment. Dunning is brutal with his animals, which include cows, sheep, and pigs, or at least it seems brutal to this city boy; Stone shows him shooting, skinning, and beheading one sheep, which caused me to look away from the screen, something I very rarely do. Stone also zooms in on a cow’s butt as it relieves itself of a massive amount of feces, followed by a vet sticking nearly his entire arm inside the animal to check if it is pregnant.

Stone (Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America), a New York City native who produced the film with his wife, musician, photographer, and actress Melissa Auf der Maur (the couple previously collaborated on Out of Our Minds and cofounded the multidisciplinary arts space Basilica Hudson), casts no judgment on Dunning, letting him just go about his business mostly on his own; they occasionally speak to each other, Stone an off-camera presence à la Albert Maysles. It’s a fascinating relationship — the two met at a farmers market when Stone was nine years old — made more than a little creepy because Dunning initially wanted Stone to film his suicide. But Peter soldiers on against all the odds, getting up every morning and feeding his flock, riding the John Deere, sharing poignant memories, and lamenting his life, which turned out very different from the way he imagined it. Peter and the Farm, which previously screened at such festivals as True/False in Missouri and New Directors / New Films at MoMA and Lincoln Center, opens November 4 at Metrograph, with Stone participating in a Q&A at the 7:00 show on Friday.

STANDING WAVES: AN AFTERNOON OF EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC AND SOUND PERFORMANCES

standing-waves

Who: Bob Bellerue & Marcia Bassett, Lea Bertucci, Roarke Menzies, Kamron Saniee, Jenn Grossman
What: Inaugural event of series featuring experimental sound and music
Where: Knockdown Center, 52-19 Flushing Ave., 347-915-5615
When: Saturday, November 5, $10, 2:00 – 7:00
Why: On November 5, the Knockdown Center in Queens is hosting the first Standing Waves event, a new series that brings together experimental composers and performers to explore sound through listening, reading, and live concerts. The inaugural event features New Yorkers Bob Bellerue & Marcia Bassett, Lea Bertucci, Roarke Menzies, Kamron Saniee, and Jenn Grossman; tickets are $10, and the show goes from 2:00 to 7:00. To get a taste of what you’re in for, you can check out some mixes here.

BRESSON ON CINEMA: PICKPOCKET

Michel (Martin LaSalle) eyes a potential target in Robert Bresson’s highly influential masterpiece PICKPOCKET

PICKPOCKET (Robert Bresson, 1959)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Friday, November 4, 5:30, 7:30, 9:30, and Sunday, November 6, 4:30
Series runs November 4-6
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Robert Bresson’s 1959 Pickpocket is a stylistic marvel, a brilliant examination of a deeply troubled man and his dark obsessions. Evoking Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Martin LaSalle made his cinematic debut as Michel, a ne’er-do-well Parisian who lives in a decrepit apartment, refuses to visit his ailing mother (Dolly Scal), and decides to become a pickpocket. But it’s not necessarily the money he’s after; he hides the cash and watches that he steals in his room, which he is unable to lock from the outside. Instead, his petty thievery seems to give him some kind of psychosexual thrill, although his pleasure can seldom be seen in his staring, beady eyes. As the film opens, Michel is at the racetrack, dipping his fingers into a woman’s purse in an erotically charged moment that is captivating, instantly turning the viewer into voyeur. Of course, film audiences by nature are a kind of peeping Tom, but Bresson makes them complicit in Michel’s actions; although there is virtually nothing to like about the character, who is distant and aloof when not being outright nasty, even to his only friends, Jacques (Pierre Leymarie) and Jeanne (Marika Green), the audience can’t help but breathlessly root for him to succeed as he dangerously dips his hands into men’s pockets on the street and in the Metro. Soon he is being watched by a police inspector (Jean Pélégri), to whom he daringly gives a book about George Barrington, the famed “Prince of Pickpockets,” as well as a stranger (Kassagi) who wants him to join a small cadre of thieves, leading to a gorgeously choreographed scene of the men working in tandem as they pick a bunch of pockets. Through it all, however, Michel remains nonplussed, living a strange, private life, uncomfortable in his own skin. “You’re not in this world,” Jeanne tells him at one point.

Michel (Martin LaSalle) can’t keep his hands to himself in Bresson classic, screening November 4 & 6 at BAM

Bresson (Au hasard Balthazar, Diary of a Country Priest) fills Pickpocket with visual clues and repeated symbols that add deep layers to the narrative, particularly an endless array of shots of hands and a parade of doors, many of which are left ajar and/or unlocked in the first half of the film but are increasingly closed as the end approaches. Shot in black-and-white by Léonce-Henri Burel — Bresson wouldn’t make his first color film until 1969’s Un femme douce — Pickpocket also has elements of film noir that combine with a visual intimacy to create a moody, claustrophobic feeling that hovers over and around Michel and the story. It’s a mesmerizing performance in a mesmerizing film, one of the finest of Bresson’s remarkable, and remarkably influential, career. Pickpocket is screening November 4 and 6 in the BAMcinématek series “Bresson on Bresson,” three days of films by Bresson as well as a handful that share his similar cinematic sensibility, being held in conjunction with the publication of a new translation of Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943-1983. The whirlwind three-day, thirteen-film series also includes Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped, and Mouchette alongside Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, Charlie Chaplin’s Gold Rush and City Lights, Robert J. Flaherty’s Louisiana Story and Man of Aran, Buster Keaton shorts, Sergei M. Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, David Lean’s Brief Encounter, and Jean Cocteau’s The Testament of Orpheus.

BROOKLYN MUSEUM FIRST SATURDAY: ELECTION SEASON

First Saturday workshop participants can make their own “I want a president” speech based on Zoe Leonard’s original 1992 text

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, November 6, free, 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

There’s no escaping the election, so the Brooklyn Museum has given in as well and is dedicating its free November First Saturday program to the upcoming vote. There will be live performances by Slavic Soul Party!, DJ Chela, and Brown Girls Burlesque (the adult Strip the Polls); the curator tour “I See Myself in You,” led by assistant curator of contemporary art Rujeko Hockley, focusing on the use of the body in art; a hands-on workshop in which participants will make their own campaign buttons; presidential pop-art talks in the American Art galleries; a workshop updating the text of Zoe Leonard’s 1992 text “I want a president,” which can currently be seen on the High Line; and Laugh the Vote comedy with Baratunde Thurston, Sherrod Small, and Christian Finnegan. In addition, you can check out such exhibits as “Beverly Buchanan — Ruins and Rituals,” “The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago,” “Life, Death, and Transformation in the Americas,” “I See Myself in You: Selections from the Collection,” and “Philippe Parreno: My Room Is Another Fish Bowl”; the fourth- and fifth-floor galleries will close at eight o’clock except for “Who Shot Sports: A Photographic History, 1843 to the Present,” which will be open all night and requires a discounted admission fee of $10.

DON’T CALL ME SON

Pierre (Naomi Nero) watches his mother get taken away in Anna Muylaert’s DON’T CALL ME SON

DON’T CALL ME SON (MÃE SÓ HÁ UMA) (Anna Muylaert, 2016)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Wednesday, November 2
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
zeitgeistfilms.com

Brazilian writer-director Anna Muylaert once again intricately explores the nature of class, identity, and family in her fifth feature film, the powerful and poignant Don’t Call Me Son. In last year’s award-winning The Second Mother, Muylaert told the story of a live-in housekeeper who was like a surrogate mother to the family she works for, but things change when her estranged teenage daughter comes to stay with her. In Don’t Call Me Son, a family is torn apart when it is discovered that the mother, Arcay (Dani Nefusi), actually stole her children, son Pierre (Naomi Nero) and daughter Jaqueline (Lais Dias), when they were babies, and the kids’ biological parents have been searching desperately for them ever since and have now found them. Pierre is a seventeen-year-old gender-bending bisexual musician who seems relatively comfortable in his own skin, at least for a seventeen-year-old gender-bending bisexual musician, until Arcay is arrested and imprisoned for kidnapping. She might not have been a model mother, but she was his mother, and he is devastated when he is suddenly forced to move in with his biological parents, Glória (also played by Nefusi) and Matheus (Matheus Nachtergaele), who are overjoyed to have him back but were expecting someone a little bit more traditional; however, Pierre’s new younger brother, Joca (Daniel Botelho), appears to be happy he now has such a cool, if tortured, sibling. Meanwhile, Jaqueline is taken away to live with her real parents. As Glória and Matheus persist in calling Pierre by the name they gave him at birth, Felipe, the teen acts out as he tries to figure out who he is and redefine his place in a world that has been turned upside down and inside out.

Jaqueline (Lais Dias) and Pierre’s (Naomi Nero) life together is suddenly thrown into upheaval in poignant Brazilian drama

Based on a true story, Don’t Call Me Son is a sensitive and honest exploration of just what family means, with intimate handheld camerawork by cinematographer Barbara Alvarez, taking viewers inside each character’s mind as it bounces between excitement and frustration. Nero makes an impressive debut as Pierre, lending complexity to a troubled teen that goes beyond the standard generational angst and ennui; his scenes in front of a mirror are simply dazzling. In an ingenious casting move, Muylaert (Collect Call, É Proibido Fumar) has Nefusi play Pierre’s birth mother and the woman who raised him, questioning just what it means to be a mother, which is further complicated because it is not obvious that the actress is performing the two parts, looking completely different in each role. Another star is Diogo Costa’s wardrobe, particularly after Pierre has moved in with his biological parents and decides to test their loyalty. There are too many plot holes and loose ends, but there’s also just the right amount of ambiguity as Muylaert considers the notion of home in clever and subtle ways.