Norway’s Verdensteatret pulls into the BAM Fisher this week with the U.S. premiere of experimental, immersive multimedia production (photo courtesy of the artist)
BROEN OVER GJØRME
BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
September 7-10, $25, 7:30 & 9:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
verdensteatret.com
BAM’s 2016 Next Wave Festival kicks off this week with the U.S. premiere of the immersive audiovisual theatrical presentation Bridge over Mud, a multimedia extravaganza by the Oslo-based arts collective Verdensteatret. “Bridge over Mud is in its very nature a fragmented and abstract work. Its main substance rests in a poetic space that stimulates your senses through a symphonic multimedia expression. The form profits both from visual art and video art, sound art and performance,” Elisabeth Leinslie writes in her September 2014 essay “You Walk as Far as the Shoes of Reason Will Take You – Then You Jump,” continuing, “This generates a challenging complexity where opposing forces collide in ‘impossible paradoxes’ on one hand and surprisingly harmonic cadences on the other. It’s a symphony of elements that entice your senses. Listening to this work may take you to places you’ve never been before.” The sixty-minute piece features abstract projections, kinetic sculpture, more than sixty speakers, a tuba player, two vocalists, and nearly two hundred feet of train tracks winding through the intimate Fishman Space at the BAM Fisher. Bridge over Mud was created by company members Asle Nilsen, Lisbeth J. Bodd, Piotr Pajchel, Eirik Blekesaune, Ali Djabbary, Martin Taxt, Espen Sommer Eide, Torgrim Torve, Elisabeth Gmeiner, Niklas Adam, Kristine Sandøy, Thorolf Thuestad, Janne Kruse, Laurent Ravot, and Benjamin Nelson, each of whom brings a unique aspect to the troupe, which “endeavors to use a collaborative process to deeply integrate different artistic disciplines into projects that bridge the gap between artistic borders.” Both exhibition and concert, Bridge over Mud is an attempt by Verdensteatreter (Louder, And All the Question Marks Started to Sing) “to play the whole room like one big instrument.” We can’t wait to check this wild one out.
In his first starring role in more than twenty years, Jerry Lewis is superb in the otherwise clichéd and maudlin melodrama Max Rose. Lewis plays the title character, an eighty-seven-year-old former jazz pianist whose just lost his beloved wife of sixty-five years, Eva (Claire Bloom). While dealing with his sudden loneliness, Max finds a small compact that a man named Ben gave to Eva on November 5, 1959, with an inscription declaring his secret love. Max becomes obsessed with finding out who the man is and determining whether his marriage was a fraud. Meanwhile, his granddaughter, Annie (Kerry Bishé), is helping Max through this difficult time, even though her own marriage might be in trouble, and Annie’s father, Max’s son, Christopher (Kevin Pollak), is experiencing his own family dilemmas. Christopher tries to reestablish a relationship with Max, but the father keeps pushing the son away. Writer-director Daniel Noah’s feature-film debut has all the hallmarks of, well, a Hallmark movie of the week, laden with genre clichés that the talented cast fights to rise above. Bishé (Argo, Halt and Catch Fire) is absolutely lovely as Max’s dedicated granddaughter, but Pollak isn’t given enough to do as Max’s beat-upon son. A scene in which Max cavorts with a group of new elderly friends has a bittersweet joy to it, at least partially because all four actors — Lewis, Rance Howard, Lee Weaver, and Mort Sahl — were in their eighties when it was filmed. Dean Stockwell, who recently turned eighty, makes a strange appearance near the end, and Bloom is an octogenarian as well.
New York City native Jim McBride’s directorial debut, the seminal David Holzman’s Diary, presages the YouTube Generation and reality shows in its depiction of a man obsessed with capturing virtually every moment of his life on camera. L. M. Kit Carson stars as David Holzman, a twenty-five-year-old unemployed schlemiel who goes everywhere with his 16mm camera, photographing the streets of his Upper West Side neighborhood, his model girlfriend, Penny (Eileen Dietz), and the woman in the apartment across the street. He also often turns the camera on himself as he discusses his life and moviemaking, directly and indirectly referencing Jean-Luc Godard, Alfred Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli, Orson Welles, and Luchino Visconti. The black-and-white film is set up as if it’s a documentary, with choppy cuts and a barely audible soundtrack of a radio playing music and sharing the news of the day (July 1967). Holzman is happiest when he gets a new fish-eye lens and shows it off by carrying it through the streets above his head, offering a different perspective of the city. Like today’s world, McBride (The Big Easy, Great Balls of Fire!) brings up issues of voyeurism and privacy, because to Holzman, it’s as if nothing really exists unless it’s on film or television (or, now, the internet). Thus, it makes sense that David Holzman’s Diary is screening as part of the Anthology Film Archives series “Voyeurism, Surveillance, and Identity in the Cinema,” being held in conjunction with the International Center of Photography’s inaugural exhibition in its new downtown space on the Bowery, the multimedia 
“Your eminence, I am not happy,” Guido (Marcello Mastroianni) tells the cardinal (Tito Masini) halfway through Federico Fellini’s self-reflexive masterpiece 8½. “Why should you be happy?” the cardinal responds. “That is not your task in life. Who said we were put on this earth to be happy?” Well, film makes people happy, and it’s because of works such as 8½. Fellini’s Oscar-winning eighth-and-a-half movie is a sensational self-examination of film and fame, a hysterically funny, surreal story of a famous Italian auteur who finds his life and career in need of a major overhaul. Mastroianni is magnificent as Guido Anselmi, a man in a personal and professional crisis who has gone to a healing spa for some much-needed relaxation, but he doesn’t get any as he is continually harassed by producers, screenwriters, would-be actresses, and various other oddball hangers-on. He also has to deal both with his mistress, Carla (Sandra Milo), who is quite a handful, as well as his wife, Luisa (Anouk Aimée), who is losing patience with his lies. Trapped in a strange world of his own creation, Guido has dreams where he flies over claustrophobic traffic and makes out with his dead mother, and his next film involves a spaceship; it doesn’t take a psychiatrist to figure out the many inner demons that are haunting him. Marvelously shot by Gianni Di Venanzo in black-and-white, scored with a vast sense of humor by Nino Rota, and featuring some of the most amazing hats ever seen on film — costume designer Piero Gherardi won an Oscar for all the great dresses and chapeaux — 8½ is an endlessly fascinating and wildly entertaining exploration of the creative process and the bizarre world of filmmaking itself. And after seeing 8½, you’ll appreciate Woody Allen’s 1980 homage, Stardust Memories, a whole lot more. “Weekend Classics” continues September 9-11 with Fellini Satyricon before concluding September 23-25 with City of Women.