twi-ny recommended events

ILLUMINATING MOONLIGHT: MOONLIGHT / KILLER OF SHEEP / SILENT LIGHT / THREE TIMES

Chiron (Alex Hibbert) looks out at a hard future in Barry Jenkins’s powerful MOONLIGHT

MOONLIGHT (Barry Jenkins, 2016)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Thursday, January 5, 6:30
Series runs January 4-9
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org
moonlight-movie.com

The Film Society of Lincoln Center is paying tribute to one of the best films of the year, Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, with the six-day series “Illuminating Moonlight,” running January 4-9 and consisting of screenings of the L.A.-based writer-director’s 2008 debut, Medicine for Melancholy, starring Wyatt Cenac and Tracey Heggins, which Jenkins will introduce; his follow-up, Moonlight, which will be followed by a Q&A with Jenkins; and six diverse works that directly influenced Jenkins in making Moonlight: Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together, Nagisa Ôshima’s Gohatto, and Claire Denis’s Beau Travail. In Moonlight, Jenkins tells the powerful and moving story of Chiron, a shy, troubled boy growing up in Liberty City, Florida, in three chapters as Chiron goes from a young boy (Little, played by Alex Hibbert) to a teenager (Chiron, played by Ashton Sanders) to a twenty-seven-year-old man (Black, played by Trevante Rhodes). The semiautobiographical film is based on playwright and actor Tarell Alvin McCraney’s In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue and Jenkins’s own experiences; both men are from Liberty City but did not know each other there. In the first section, Little is chased by bullies and runs into an abandoned building, where he is found by Juan (Mahershala Ali), a drug dealer who brings him home to his girlfriend, Teresa (Janelle Monáe). They become a kind of surrogate family, as Little’s mother, Paula (Naomie Harris), is a crack addict who will do just about anything for her next score. Little also finds solace in his friendship with Kevin (Jaden Piner, later played by Jharrel Jerome and André Holland). In the second chapter, Chiron is taunted and bullied by Terrel (Patrick Decile) while trying to come to terms with his sexual orientation. In the third section, the passage of time reveals how much has changed, although the film turns overly melodramatic at the end. Taking its inspiration from the source material, Moonlight is beautifully photographed by James Laxton, who has previously shot Medicine for Melancholy and Jenkins’s 2003 shorts, My Josephine and Little Brown Boy, and 2011 “Remigration” episode of Futurestates, bathing the film in lush blues. Jenkins’s subtly paced style is accompanied by a gorgeous classical-inspired score by Nicholas Britell (The Big Short). Moonlight is anchored by superb performances by Emmy nominee Ali (House of Cards, Hidden Figures) as the cool and caring Juan; Harris (Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, 28 Days Later) as the drug-addicted Paula, who has lost control of her life; Monáe (Hidden Figures, The Electric Lady) as the sweet and understanding Teresa; and Sanders (The Retrieval) as the in-between Chiron, who feels overwhelmed by all the maelstrom swirling around him.

Charles Burnett’s KILLER OF SHEEP examines black life in postwar America

KILLER OF SHEEP (Charles Burnett, 1977)
Wednesday, January 4, 7:00
Sunday, January 8, 8:45
www.filmlinc.org
www.killerofsheep.com

In 2007, Milestone Films restored and released Charles Burnett’s low-budget feature-length debut, Killer of Sheep, with the original soundtrack intact; the film had not been available on VHS or DVD for decades because of music rights problems that were finally cleared. (The soundtrack includes such seminal black artists as Etta James, Dinah Washington, Little Walter, and Paul Robeson.) Shot on weekends for less than $10,000, Killer of Sheep took four years to put together and another four years to get noticed, when it won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 1981 Berlin Film Festival. Reminiscent of the work of Jean Renoir and the Italian neo-Realists, the film tells a simple story about a family just trying to get by, struggling to survive in their tough Watts neighborhood in the mid-1970s. The slice-of-life scenes are sometimes very funny, sometimes scary, but always poignant, as Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders) trudges to his dirty job in a slaughterhouse in order to provide for his wife (Kaycee Moore) and children (Jack Drummond and Angela Burnett). Every day he is faced with new choices, from participating in a murder to buying a used car engine, but he takes it all in stride. The motley cast of characters, including Charles Bracy and Eugene Cherry, is primarily made up of nonprofessional actors with a limited range of talent, but that is all part of what makes it all feel so real. Killer of Sheep was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1989, the second year of the program, making it among the first fifty to be selected, in the same group as Rebel Without a Cause, The Godfather, Duck Soup, All About Eve, and It’s a Wonderful Life, which certainly puts its place in history in context. Killer of Sheep is screening January 4 and 8 in the “Illuminating Moonlight” series.

The beautifully minimalist SILENT LIGHT served as an influence on Barry Jenkins’s MOONLIGHT

SILENT LIGHT (STELLET LICHT) (Carlos Reygadas, 2007)
Thursday, January 5, 3:30
Sunday, January 8, 6:00
www.filmlinc.org

Carlos Reygadas’s Silent Light is a gentle, deeply felt, gorgeously shot work of intense calm and beauty. The film opens with a stunning sunrise and ends with a glorious sunset; in between is scene after scene of sublime beauty and simplicity, as Reygadas uses natural sound and light, a cast of mostly nonprofessional actors, and no incidental music to tell his story, allowing it to proceed naturally. In a Mennonite farming community in northern Mexico where Plautdietsch is the primary language, Johan (Cornelio Wall Fehr) is torn between his wife, Esther (Miriam Toews), and his lover, Marianne (Maria Pankratz). While he loves Esther, he finds a physical and spiritual bond with Marianne that he does not feel with his wife and their large extended family. Although it pains Johan deeply to betray Esther, he is unable to decide between the two women, even after tragedy strikes. Every single shot of the spare, unusual film, which tied for the Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival (with Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis), is meticulously composed by Reygadas (Japon, Battle in Heaven) and cinematographer Alexis Zabe, as if a painting. Many of the scenes consist of long takes with little or no camera movement and sparse dialogue, evoking the work of Japanese minimalist master Yasujiro Ozu. The lack of music evokes the silence of the title, but the quiet, filled with space and meaning, is never empty. And the three leads — Fehr, who lives in Mexico; Toews, who is from Canada; and Pankratz, who was born in Kazakhstan and lives in Germany — are uniformly excellent in their very first film roles. Screening January 5 and 8 in the “Illuminating Moonlight” series, Silent Light is a mesmerizing, memorable, and very different kind of cinematic experience.

Chang Chen and Shu Qi fall in love in three different decades in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s THREE TIMES

THREE TIMES (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2005)
Friday, January 6, 4:00
Sunday, January 8, 3:00
www.filmlinc.org

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s gorgeous Three Times is an evocative, poetic trilogy of tales about life and love in Taiwan, all starring the mesmerizing Shu Qi (Hou’s Millennium Mambo) and the stalwart Chang Chen (Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 and Happy Together). In A Time for Love, set in 1966 and featuring a repeated soft-rock soundtrack, Chen, about to leave for military service, meets May, a pool-hall girl, and promises to write to her even though they have only just met and barely said a word to each other. When he gets a furlough, he goes to the pool hall only to find that she’s on the move, so with Zen-like cool he tries to track her down. A Time for Freedom, a silent film with interstitial dialogue and period music, takes place in an elegant brothel in 1911, where Mr. Chang regularly visits a beautiful courtesan. But while she dreams of him buying out her contract and marrying her, he seems intent on helping out another couple instead. Hou concludes the trilogy with A Time for Youth, set in fast-paced modern-day Taipei, as Jing, an epileptic singer, and Zhen, a motorcycle-riding photographer, embark on a passionate, nearly wordless affair that has serious consequences for their significant others. Three Times is a rare treat for cineastes, a poetic, intelligent, though overly long study of relationships between men and women in a changing Taiwan over the last hundred years, focusing on character, time and place, and the art of filmmaking itself. Three Times is screening January 6 and 8 in the “Illuminating Moonlight” series.

AGNES MARTIN

Agnes Martin’s work feels right at home in major retrospective at the Guggenheim (photo by David Heald, courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum)

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Friday – Wednesday through January 11, $18 – $25 (pay-what-you-wish Saturday, 5:45-7:45)
212-423-3587
www.guggenheim.org

“To be an artist,” Agnes Martin once explained, “you look, you perceive, you recognize what is going through your mind, and it is not ideas. Everything you feel, and everything you see — your whole life goes through your mind, you know. I have to recognize it and go with it.” The same can be said for visitors who attend the absolutely lovely, simply titled retrospective “Agnes Martin,” continuing at the Guggenheim through January 11. As you spiral your way up the chronological exhibit, you are not only connecting with Martin’s life but your own as well, giving you a newfound appreciation of your very existence. Born in March 1912 in Saskatchewan, Canada, Martin lived in New York City and New Mexico during her most productive years, working daily up to her death in 2004 at the age of ninety-two. A former teacher (and onetime driver for John Huston), she never married and never had children; she was diagnosed with schizophrenia, living alone her entire adult life. Her paintings defy categorization, which was fine with her; her canvases incorporated Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism but were much more than that. “I would like [my pictures] to represent beauty, innocence, and happiness,” she proclaimed. “I would like them all to represent that. Exaltation.” And it is indeed exalting walking through the exhibition, which includes more than one hundred works that reveal Martin’s expert control of line, geometric form, grids, and color, delivered in spare, understated style.

Agnes Martin, “Friendship,” incised gold leaf and gesso on canvas, 1963 (© 2015 Agnes Martin /Artists Rights Society, New York)

The paintings feel at home in the Guggenheim bays, complemented by the white walls, lighting fixtures, and horizontal vents, which sometimes appear to have been created just for this show, earning bonus kudos to senior curator Tracey Bashkoff and guest curator Tiffany Bell. The first gallery actually begins with the midcareer suite “The Islands,” a group of nearly identical monochromatic paintings that set the tone for the rest of the show. “You see one canvas after another, and they’re similar until you look at them up close and you see how the artist’s hand has moved through the canvas and the marks that she has made,” notes Bashkoff, referring to Martin’s general oeuvre. “It’s by slowing down and looking at Martin’s canvases individually, taking in all of the details — it’s at those moments that you get close to this thoughtfulness and deliberateness.” Other paintings that reward extra attention are “This Rain,” two rectangles reminiscent of Mark Rothko; the kinetic sculpture “The Wave”; “White Flower,” a white grid on a dark canvas that has ghostly images floating in the background; “Little Sister,” composed of rows of dots; “Friendship,” a mesmerizing canvas of sparkling gold; “Happy Holiday,” boasting alternate stripes of white and peach pastel; “Heather,” consisting of rare vertical rectangles; and “Homage to Life,” from 2003, a floating black trapezoid in the center of a gray ground.

Agnes Martin show at the Guggenheim features beautiful works filled with glorious line, color, and form (photo by David Heald, courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum)

“I believe in living above the line,” Martin said. “Above the line is happiness and love, you know. Below the line is all sadness and destruction and unhappiness. And I don’t go down below the line for anything.” Those are words to live by, from an artist who approached the world in a unique way, beautifully memorialized in one of the best shows of the year. On January 10 at 6:30 ($15), Quiet: A Poetry Reading for Agnes Martin will feature recitations by poets Ari Banias, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Souvankham Thammavongsa, a reception, and an exhibition viewing, an evening curated by artist Jen Bervin. Martin fans should also make their way to Dia:Beacon, where several rooms of her work are on long-term display.

DR. FEELGOOD: DEALER OR HEALER?

Dr. William Hurwitz playfully states his case in documentary about prescription painkiller addiction

DR. FEELGOOD: DEALER OR HEALER? (Eve Marson, 2016)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, December 30
212-529-6799
www.cinemavillage.com
www.drfeelgoodfilm.com

There’s an odd element that runs through Eve Marson’s documentary Dr. Feelgood: Dealer or Healer? In nearly every new interview with film subject Dr. William Hurwitz, whose treatment of chronic pain included prescribing sometimes tens of thousands of opioids over a twelve-to-eighteen-month period for a single patient, the physician has a sly smile, as if this is all a kind of joke, or that he doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. “One of the best reasons to go into medical practice is to help people. When somebody comes to you and they feel their life is constrained by pain, the ability to relieve that pain gives enormous satisfaction,” he explains at the beginning of the film. And he is still very satisfied, despite the death of at least two of his patients, time in prison, and the loss of his medical license. The film points out that one in three Americans suffer from chronic pain and that more than 200 million prescriptions for opioid painkillers are written each year. Marson shows viewers several sides of the controversial topic, in interviews with Dr. Hurwitz’s daughter, Gabriela; his ex-wife, Nilse Quercia; his former nurse, Ann Wierbinski; his former receptionist, Georgia Tsourounis; his defense attorney, Lawrence Robbins; patients Molly Shaw, Bret McCarter, and Jane Tanner; pain-treatment expert Dr. Anna Lembke; FBI agent Aaron Weeter; retired Fairfax County police officer Ken Pedigo; New York Times journalist John Tierney; Paul Nye and Michaelina Woodson, who believe Dr. Hurwitz’s treatment killed their spouses; and retired physician Dr. Hal Talley, who points out, “We have never come up with a test that tells you whether somebody is in pain or not.”

The multiple perspectives reveal that there are no easy answers to this complex issue: Some see Dr. Hurwitz as an angel, while others are convinced he is a demon. Written by Mark Monroe and Sara Goldblatt and produced by Goldblatt and Marson, the film also includes archival footage, re-creations, and news reports, most notably from 60 Minutes. Through it all, Dr. Hurwitz, a Stanford grad, keeps wearing that grin, as if he thinks all of this detailed examination is rather beside the point. “I like taking care of people,” he says. That’s all well and good, but as Dr. Feelgood shows, addiction to painkillers is no laughing matter. The film opens December 30 at Cinema Village, with Marson participating in a Q&A following the 7:15 screening on January 2.

SCREENING + LIVE EVENT: ELLE WITH ISABELLE HUPPERT IN PERSON

The purr-fectly delightful Isabelle Huppert will discuss ELLE at a special screening and Q&A at the Museum of the Moving Image on January 4

The purr-fectly delightful Isabelle Huppert will discuss ELLE at special screening and Q&A at the Museum of the Moving Image on January 4

Who: Isabelle Huppert
What: Elle with Isabelle Huppert in person
Where: Museum of the Moving Image, 35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria, 718-777-6800
When: Wednesday, January 4, $25, 7:00
Why: French superstar Isabelle Huppert has been garnering worldwide acclaim for her latest film, Elle, directed by Paul Verhoeven, whose previous works include RoboCop, Basic Instinct, Showgirls, and Black Book. On January 4 at 7:00, the sixty-three-year-old Huppert, who has made more than 120 films, from The Lacemaker, Loulou, and Coup de Torchon to La Cérémonie, The Piano Teacher, and Heaven’s Gate, will be at the Museum of the Moving Image for a Q&A and special screening of Elle, a disturbing tour de force showcasing Huppert’s mesmerizing performance as either victim or monster. Feminists and film theorists might fight about this one for years; the rest of us can just marvel at Huppert, unable to take our eyes off her for a second.

PIPILOTTI RIST: PIXEL FOREST

Immersive “Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest” is most popular exhibition in history of New Museum (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Tuesday through Sunday through January 15/22 (closed January 1-2), $12-$18
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org

There’s a very good reason why “Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest” has become the most popular exhibit in the history of the New Museum: It’s a splendidly curated, warm and embracing show that invites viewers into a magical world in which nature and humanity are one. The Swiss artist has been trapped under the floor of MoMA PS1’s lobby for decades, her tiny video calling up to passersby from the floorboards in “Selfless in the Bath of Lava,” and she mesmerized MoMA visitors with the Marron Atrium immersive multimedia work “Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)” in 2008, but her first comprehensive U.S. survey is so much bigger, taking up three floors of the downtown institution, each one offering its own charms. Rist doesn’t just design installations; she welcomes you into delightful environments where you can relax, kick off your shoes, and get lost in a display of pure beauty. “In the generous, lush, expansive, and fecund universe created by Pipilotti Rist, we are all but small, organic specks in a massive, corporeal cosmos — ever-connected, always reproducing, endlessly social and intriguing as we move through space and time, colliding with other molecular debris,” Juliana Engberg writes in her catalog essay “A Bee Flew in the Window. . . .”

Pipilotti Rist’s “4th Floor to Mildness” offers a relaxing multimedia journey at the New Museum (photo by Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio)

Curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Margot Norton, and Helga Christoffersen, “Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest” begins with “Open My Glade (Flatten),” a single-channel video of dreamy colors and Rist pressing up against the New Museum’s front window, as if in a kind of fishbowl that cannot contain her. In the lobby, “Nichts (Nothing)” is a mechanical contraption that emits large soap bubbles filled with smoke, floating through the air until popping on the floor, what Rist calls “peace bombs.” On the second floor, a long, narrow corridor contains several of Rist’s early single-channel videos, set up so only one person can watch each one at a time, as if a personal peepshow, comprising cutting-edge experimental works that play with technology while redefining female identity, including “I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much,” “(Absolutions) Pipilotti’s Mistakes,” and “You Called Me Jacky,” while “Sexy Sad I” follows a nude man in the woods and “When My Mother’s Brother Was Born It Smelled Like Wild Pear Blossoms in Front of the Brown-burnt Sill” shows a live birth. Those private viewings serve as an introduction to the larger works experienced by groups. In the two-channel “Ever Is Over All,” on the left side a woman marches down a street, gleefully smashing in car windows with a flower stick, being followed by a female police officer, while on the right the camera scans a field of the same flowers. (Yes, Beyoncé took a page from Rist in her “Lemonade” video.) The two-channel cater-corner “Sip My Ocean” is a kaleidoscopic underwater journey set to Rist and Anders Guggisberg singing Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game.” Nearby, “The Patience” can be seen on a boulder. “Administrating Eternity” forms pathways of moving mirrors and curtains. And in “Suburb Brain,” a miniature model of a suburban home, with life going on inside, sits in front of a two-channel installation, one side projected onto a wall of whitewashed everyday objects.

Pipilotti Rist’s “Open My Glade (Flatten)” can be seen at the New Museum and in Times Square (photo by Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio)

On the third floor, visitors make their way through “Pixel Forest,” three thousand hanging LED lights that change color with the music and images surrounding them, each light representing one pixel, to get to “Worry Will Vanish Horizon,” where viewers relax on cushiony duvets while watching a two-channel video of natural surroundings, hands, eyes, and more. “Mercy Garden” also offers respite, while “Massachusetts Chandelier” is a light covered in underpants. As you venture to the fourth floor, be sure not to step on another iteration of “Selfless in the Bath of Lava,” which resides on the floor of the landing, now showing Rist trapped in a cell phone. The fourth floor consists of “Your Space Time Capsule,” a room in a wooden transport crate, and “4th Floor to Mildness,” a large area that offers visitors single and double beds where they get comfortable while watching two videos projected onto amorphous screens on the ceiling as mirrors reflect the light onto the viewer, resulting in a dreamlike trip into mysterious worlds. It’s a rapturous show that confirms Rist’s description of her art as the “glorification of the wonder of evolution,” as she takes visitors on a psychedelic journey into the body and the mind, into life above and below the sea, merging the natural world and technology, sound and image, into private and shared experiences that are especially hypnotic in these dark times. On January 7 at 10:00 am, the museum will host the workshop “First Saturdays for Families: Crafting Eternity”; on January 12 at 3:30, curator and writer Laura McLean-Ferris will give an Outside the Box gallery talk; and on January 19 at 7:00, there will be a conversation between Rist and New Museum artistic director Gioni. The full exhibition continues through January 15, with the second and third floors open until January 22; in addition, Times Square Arts’ Midnight Moment will feature a new version of “Open My Glade (Flatten)” every night in January at 11:57 across multiple billboards.

OTHELLO

Iago (Daniel Craig) makes his case to Othello (David Oyelowo) in gripping NYTW production (photo by Chad Batka)

New York Theatre Workshop
79 East Fourth St. between Second & Third Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 18, $129
Thursday, January 12 benefit, $1,500 – $2,500
www.nytw.org

“Were I the Moor I would not be Iago. In following him, I follow but myself. Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,” Iago (Daniel Craig) says in the first scene of William Shakespeare’s Othello. “I am not what I am.” What he is is a villain, one of the most devious in the Bard’s canon, and in Sam Gold’s captivating, intense production at New York Theatre Workshop, the audience is also Iago’s judge. Set designer Andrew Lieberman has transformed NYTW into a plywood-encased military barracks where the audience sits on benches on three sides of the action, the main sections holding rows of twelve people, like courtroom juries. The soliloquies are delivered as if closing statements in a trial, the characters trying to convince the audience of their innocence — or guilt. Reminiscent of Nicholas Hytner’s 2013 National Theatre production set in a contemporary military base (among other locations), NYTW’s version is sparer, the long, narrow stage area featuring mattresses and lights on the floor. Iago, ensign to military hero and Moor Othello (David Oyelowo), is determined to exact revenge on Othello for an unproved slight by sabotaging his marriage to Desdemona (Rachel Brosnahan), the daughter of Venetian senator Brabantio (Glenn Fitzgerald). With the help of his naïve friend Roderigo (Matthew Maher), Iago concocts a plan to drive Othello mad with jealousy, trying to convince him that Desdemona is in love with Michael Cassio (Finn Wittrock), Othello’s dedicated captain. “Thou art sure of me. I have told thee often, and I retell thee again and again, I hate the Moor,” Iago says to Roderigo. “My cause is hearted; thine hath no less reason. If thou canst cuckold him, thou dost thyself a pleasure, me a sport,” he adds, explaining how he will get even with Othello, believing that the Moor might have bedded his wife, Emilia (Marsha Stephanie Blake). After Roderigo exits, Iago states his case to the audience-jury: “And it is thought abroad that ’twixt my sheets ’has done my office. I know not if ’t be true, but I, for mere suspicion in that kind, will do as if for surety. He holds me well. The better shall my purpose work on him.” As Othello falls for the ruse, tragedy awaits.

New York Theatre Workshop is transformed into military barracks in Sam Gold’s OTHELLO (photo by Chad Batka)

Royal Shakespeare Company veteran Oyelowo (Volpone, Prometheus Bound) and Craig (A Steady Rain, Casino Royale) make a formidable duo as Othello and Iago, roles previously played by such pairs as Paul Robeson and José Ferrer, Richard Burton and John Neville (alternating parts), Laurence Olivier and Frank Finlay, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Ewan McGregor, and Laurence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh. Craig is tough and determined as Iago, dead-set on succeeding in his evil goal, while Oyelowo combines an engaging ardor with a heartbreaking vulnerability. Emmy nominee Brosnahan (The Big Knife, House of Cards) plays Desdemona with a strong independence, Blake (Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Hurt Village) brings depth to Emilia, and Wittrock (Death of a Salesman, American Horror Story) is firm and solid as the loyal Cassio. Through much of the play, other soldiers (Blake DeLong, Anthony Michael Lopez, Kyle Vincent Terry, Slate Holmgren) roam the stage, carrying machine guns, as if violence can explode at any moment, always on the verge of war, keeping things tense as well as frighteningly contemporary, given the state of the world today. Tony winner Gold (Fun Home, The Flick) keeps the racial aspect of Othello simmering just below the surface, ever-present but not overwhelming, casting a black Othello and Emilia and a white Iago and Desdemona among the multiracial cast. (Surprisingly, for most of the twentieth century, Othello was played by white men in major productions, sometimes in blackface.) Gold occasionally breaks the tension with drinking songs led by DeLong on guitar, the characters declaring at one point, “We are, we are, we are, we are the Engineers. / We can, we can, we can demolish forty beers. / Drink up, drink up, drink up and come along with us / ’Cause we don’t give a damn about any old man who don’t give a damn about us.” They’re odd but necessary sidebars in this powerful and intimate three-hour show that grabs you and never lets you go.

CURATORS’ CHOICE: NO HOME MOVIE

Chantal Akerman creates a unique profile of her mother in deeply personal NO HOME MOVIE

NO HOME MOVIE (Chantal Akerman, 2015)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Sunday, January 1, 2:00
December 30 – January 8
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
icarusfilms.com

Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie was meant to be a kind of public eulogy for her beloved mother, Natalia (Nelly) Akerman, who died in 2014 at the age of eighty-six, shortly after Chantal had completed shooting forty hours of material with her. But it also ended up becoming, in its own way, a public eulogy for the highly influential Belgian auteur herself, as she died on October 5, 2015, at the age of sixty-five, only a few months after the film screened to widespread acclaim at several festivals (except at Locarno, where it was actually booed). Her death was reportedly a suicide, following a deep depression brought on by the loss of her mother. No Home Movie primarily consists of static shots inside Nelly’s Brussels apartment as she goes about her usual business, reading, eating, preparing to go for a walk, and taking naps. Akerman sets down either a handheld camera or a smartphone and lets her mother walk in and out of the frame; Akerman very rarely moves the camera or follows her mother around, instead keeping it near doorways and windows. She’s simply capturing the natural rhythms and pace of an old woman’s life. Occasionally the two sit down together in the kitchen and eat while discussing family history and gossip, Judaism, WWII, and the Nazis. (The elder Akerman was a Holocaust survivor who spent time in Auschwitz.) They also Skype each other as Chantal travels to film festivals and other places. “I want to show there is no distance in the world,” she tells her mother, who Skypes back, “You always have such ideas! Don’t you, sweetheart.” In another exchange, the daughter says, “You think I’m good for nothing!” to which the mother replies, “Not at all! You know all sorts of things others don’t know.”

Shots of a tree fluttering in the Israeli wind enhance the peaceful calm of NO HOME MOVIE

Later they are joined by Chantal’s sister, Sylviane, as well as Nelly’s home aide. The film features long sections with no dialogue and nobody in the frame; Akerman opens the movie with a four-minute shot of a lone tree with green leaves fluttering in the wind in the foreground, the vast, empty landscape of Israel in the background, where occasionally a barely visible car turns off a far-away road. Akerman returns to Israel several times during the film, sometimes shooting out of a moving car; these sections serve as interludes about the passage of time as well as referencing her family’s Jewish past. At one point, Akerman makes potatoes for her mother that they eat in the kitchen, a direct reference to a scene in Akerman’s feminist classic, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai due Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Knowing about what happened to both mother and daughter postfilming casts a shadow over the documentary, especially when Chantal tells her mother, “I’m in a very, very good mood. . . . Let’s enjoy it; it’s not that common.” As the film nears its conclusion, there is almost total darkness, echoing the end of life. Through it all, Akerman is proud of her mother; reminiscing about kindergarten, she remembers, “And to everybody, I would say, this is my mother.” No Home Movie achieves that very same declaration, now for all the world to see and hear. No Home Movie is screening January 1 at 2:00 in the Museum of the Moving Image eclectic 2016 wrap-up “Curators’ Choice,” which runs December 30 through January 8, consisting of ten films chosen by chief curator David Schwartz and associate film curator Eric Hynes that might have slipped past your radar, including Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!, Vitaly Mansky’s Under the Sun, Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster, Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits, followed by a Q&A with Holmer, Ezra Edelman’s 467-minute O.J.: Made in America, followed by a Q&A with Edelman and producer Caroline Waterlow, and Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson, followed by a Q&A with Johnson and editor Nels Bangerter.