twi-ny recommended events

AN ANIMATED WORLD — CELEBRATING 5 YEARS OF GKIDS CLASSICS: THE PAINTING

Ramo and Claire attempt to overcome class boundaries and find the creator in Jean-François Laguionie’s THE PAINTING

THE PAINTING (LE TABLEAU) (Jean-François Laguionie, 2012)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Monday, December 30, 6:15
Series continues through January 2
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.gkids.tv

Jean-François Laguionie’s award-winning animated film, The Painting, has a very cool premise: The characters inside one of a painter’s works have organized a rigid class structure of the Alldunns, who have been completed and have sole access to the ritzy castle; the Halfies, who are not quite finished and are not allowed to join them; and the Sketchies, outlined figures who are terribly abused by the Alldunns. At the center of it all is an impossible Romeo and Juliet-like love story between the Alldunn Ramo (voiced by Adrien Larmande) and the Halfie Claire (Chloé Berthier). With the power-hungry Alldunns, led by the Great Chandelier (Jacques Roehrich), on the rampage, Ramo, the Sketchie known as Quill (Thierry Jahn), and Claire’s best friend, the Halfie Lola (Jessica Monceau), are on the run, trying to reunite the lovers and find the real-life painter so he can finish the Halfies and Sketchies and bring peace to the land. But soon they have fallen out of their painting and into the artist’s studio, where they meet characters from other works, including a reclining nude (Céline Ronte) and a self-portrait (Laguionie), and enter different canvases during their adventurous, and dangerous, search for the creator. Laguionie (Rowing Across the Atlantic, A Monkey’s Tale), who has been making animated films for five decades, has fun mimicking Modigliani, Matisse, Picasso, and other major artists, but his world-building doesn’t quite hold together as the characters continue on their colorful journey. He successfully walks that fine line between playful parable and melodramatic morality play, but things ultimately get away from him as the resolution nears. The Painting is screening December 30 at 6:15 at the IFC Center as part of the series “An Animated World: Celebrating 5 Years of GKIDS Classics,” paying tribute to GKIDS’ ongoing New York International Children’s Film Festival, which continues with such other animated works as Tono Errando, Javier Mariscal, and Fernando Trueba’s Chico & Rita, Goro Miyazaki’s From Up on Poppy Hill, and Jacques-Remy Girerd’s Mia and the Migoo.

SEE IT BIG! GREAT CINEMATOGRAPHERS: PERSONA

Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson come together in Ingmar Bergman’s dazzling PERSONA

PERSONA (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Sunday, December 29, free with museum admission, 2:30
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

Ingmar Bergman’s magnificently complex 1966 avant-garde masterpiece, Persona, is not just about the relationship between an actress who has suddenly decided to stop speaking and the young nurse caring for her but about the very power of film as a narrative device able to explore and examine the psychological behavior of characters both fictional and real. Persona opens with mysterious, penetrating music by Lars Johan Werle joined by the sound and image of a movie projector as the reel counts down from ten, featuring snippets of an erect male member, a cartoon, a child’s hands, a comedic silent ghost story, a tarantula, a bleeding slaughtered lamb, and a nail being hammered through a man’s palm before the camera takes viewers inside a hospital where a boy in a bed (Jörgen Lindström) starts reading Mikhail Lermontov’s mid-nineteenth-century book A Hero of Our Time, which the author describes as “a portrait, but not of one man only. . . . You will tell me, as you have told me before, that no man can be so bad as this; and my reply will be: ‘If you believe that such persons as the villains of tragedy and romance could exist in real life, why can you not believe in the reality of Pechorin?’ . . . Is it not because there is more truth in it than may be altogether palatable to you?” That passage relates to Bergman’s oeuvre as a whole but particularly to Persona, a film about identity, storytelling, and the medium itself.

A young boy reaches out in avant-garde Bergman masterpiece, spectacularly photographed by Sven Nykvist

Bergman muse Liv Ullmann stars as Elisabet Vogler, an actress who suddenly stops talking while onstage in the midst of a play and continues her silence as she is hospitalized in an institution. Her doctor (Margaretha Krook) is sure there is nothing seriously wrong with Elisabet, that her refraining from speech is a choice based on the horrors she sees in the world. “Reality is diabolical,” she tells her, before sending Elisabeth and Nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson) to her cottage on Fårö Island, hoping the isolation will help ease her fears. On the island, Alma opens up about her own life, particularly about sex, but as the two women grow extremely close, they are also torn apart, both by the narrative and the celluloid, which rips and burns halfway through, setting up a chilling conclusion that is part existential thriller, part ghost story, and very much a sharp, incisive look deep into the human psyche. Filmed in haunting black-and-white by Sven Nykvist and including numerous dazzling, experimental shots, Persona is a grand cinematic achievement, an intense work that expanded the boundaries of what the medium can do. In his 1990 book, Images: My Life in Film, Bergman wrote, “Today I feel that in Persona — and later in Cries and Whispers — I had gone as far as I could go. And that in these two instances, when working in total freedom, I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover.” Indeed, “wordless secrets” abound in Persona, one of Bergman’s most penetrating and mesmerizing tales. Even the title holds additional meaning, as “persona,” in Latin, originally referred to the mask an actor wore that represented the character they were playing onstage. Persona is screening December 28 at 6:00 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image series “See It Big! Great Cinematographers,” which continues at 4:30 with David Lean’s 1965 epic, Doctor Zhivago, photographed by Freddie Young.

GRAND CENTRAL HOLIDAY TRAIN SHOW 2013

Twelfth annual Grand Central Terminal Holiday Train Show continues through February 23 (photo by twi-ny.mdr)

GRAND CENTRAL HOLIDAY TRAIN SHOW
New York Transit Museum Gallery Annex
Shuttle Passage next to the Station Masters’ Office
Open daily through February 23, free, 8:00/10:00 am – 6:00/7:00/8:00 pm
www.mta.info

Grand Central Terminal concludes its centennial celebration with its twelfth annual Holiday Train Show, cruising around the New York Transit Museum Gallery Annex through February 23. A collaboration between Lionel and TW Design, the layout once again combines old favorites with some new touches. As you walk inside the gallery, you are met by a model of Grand Central itself, in front of the MetLife building. You’ll also find such city monuments as the Empire State Building (complete with King Kong) and Philip Johnson’s AT&T/Sony building, along with such smaller stops as a sporting goods store, a pho restaurant, a barber shop, Irene’s diner, a toy store, an old Esso station, a pharmacy, and Willard’s Hobbies, which features its own mini-train set. There are also vintage New York Central Railroad model trains (the Commodore Vanderbilt and the Empire State Express), a model of the Metro-North M7 commuter train, and a colorful mural from Maira Kalman’s 1999 book, Next Stop Grand Central. And as an added bonus, there is a time-lapse video outside the gallery showing the construction of this year’s setup.

REBIRTH: RECENT WORK BY MARIKO MORI

Mariko Mori, “Transcircle 1.1,” stone, Corian, LED, real-time control system, 2004 (courtesy of the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo / photo by Richard Goodbody)

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through January 12, $12 (free Friday from 6:00 to 9:00)
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

For her first museum show in more than a decade, Tokyo-born artist Mariko Mori explores the interconnectedness between humanity and the cosmos, the body and the universe, and the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Continuing through January 12 at Japan Society, “Rebirth” comprises sculpture, video, photography, and installation that celebrates peace and love while delving into a past, present, and future that comes together through primal consciousness. “Why are souls born in this world, and why do we depart to another world? Why have we chosen to leave that world to be born in this world and exist in the here and now?” Mori asked in a 2007 interview with Lida Takayo that the author incorporates into the exhibition catalog essay “Mariko Mori’s ‘Rebirth’: Ancient, Futuristic Visions.” “There can be only one answer. We are here so that we can experience love. I was born here so that my love can bring peace to the world,” Mori concludes. The artist, who lives and works in Tokyo, London, and New York, takes visitors on a journey from the Middle Jōmon period of several thousand centuries BCE to the birth of a star, beginning with the glowing Lucite “Ring,” which hangs over the lobby pond, and “Birds I,” nearly hidden in the bamboo garden above. The pairing of “Primal Memory” with “Mask,” followed by “Flatstone” and “Transcircle 1.1,” meld such ancient traditions as the stone circle with modern technology; for example, the Stonehenge-like “Transcircle 1.1” consists of nine tall monoliths arranged in a circle, glowing in changing LED color schemes based on the orbit of the eight planets and Pluto around the sun. Meanwhile, the ceramic rocks in “Flatstone” are centered by an acrylic version of the Middle Jōmon vase on view nearby.

White Hole, 2008–10. Acrylic and LED lights; 136 1/8 × 103 1/2 inches. Courtesy of SCAI THE BATHHOUSE, Tokyo and Sean Kelly, New York. Installation photograph by Richard Goodbody.

Mariko Mori, “White Hole,” acrylic and LED lights, 2008-10 (courtesy SCAI THE BATHHOUSE, Tokyo, and Sean Kelly, New York / photo by Richard Goodbody)

In the almost blindingly white Bamboo Room, consciousness is further raised in “Miracle,” comprising eight brightly colored Cibachrome prints on the back wall and a round platform over which a small crystal ball dangles on a chain above the smooth epoxy orb “Tama I” and salt. Walking slowly around the platform offers visitors a changing reality. The exhibition, which also includes the “Journey to Seven Light Bay, Primal Rhythm” video of the first of Mori’s six planned outdoor site-specific environmental sculptural projects, the drawing series “Higher Being” and “White Hole,” and the “Ālaya” digital video (as well as bonus black-and-white archaeological photographs on the lower level), concludes with the consciousness-expanding immersive multimedia installation “White Hole.” In a dark room at the end of a short, winding corridor, a convex circle awaits, looking like a large futuristic eye centered on a low, angled ceiling. Soon a light projection emerges, growing and spiraling as it echoes a star being absorbed into a black hole and being freed from gravity through a white hole. “If the dramas of death and rebirth, as well as new birth, unfold across many parallel dimensions, there exists an eternal time and space that has no beginning and no end,” Mori has said about the piece. “I hope this work serves as a simulacrum of death and rebirth, prompting us to rethink the multidimensional universe that defies our imagination.” To get the full experience, visitors should first lie down on the provided mat, staring into the middle of the hole, but then get up and approach the light, following its dizzying journey. In fact, much of “Rebirth” is rewarded by spending time with the objects, meditating on them while considering the interdependence of humanity and the universe.

SEE IT BIG! GREAT CINEMATOGRAPHERS: FAT CITY

Stacey Keach and Jeff Bridges fight for a better life in and out of the ring in FAT CITY

Stacey Keach and Jeff Bridges look for a better life in and out of the ring in John Huston’s FAT CITY

FAT CITY (John Huston, 1972)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, December 28, free with museum admission, 6:00
Series runs through December 29
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

Genre master and onetime boxer John Huston returned to the ring in Fat City, a gritty 1972 drama about a group of has-beens and never-will-be’s struggling to survive in Stockton, California. Stacey Keach stars as Billy Tully, a down-on-his-luck fighter looking to make a comeback at the ripe old age of twenty-nine. He spars at the local Y with eighteen-year-old Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges) and likes what he sees in the kid, telling him to meet his old manager, Ruben (Cheers’ Nicholas Colosanto), who decides to take on the unseasoned youngster. While Ruben lands Ernie — who seems more interested in bragging about having scored with his girlfriend, Faye (Candy Clark), than training properly — his first few bouts, Tully gets day work picking vegetables and hangs out at a local gin joint with a seedy, whiskey-voiced barfly named Oma (an Oscar-nominated Susan Tyrrell). Legendary cinematographer Conrad Hall, who shot such wide-ranging gems as Cool Hand Luke, In Cold Blood, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man, and American Beauty, casts a gray pall over the proceedings as dashed hopes and dreams come falling down on these disillusioned perennial losers. In many ways Fat City, based on the novel by Leonard Gardner — who also wrote the screenplay — is an update of Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, but moved to the hard times of early ’70s America, when so many people had no way out. You do not have to be a fight fan to fall in love with this film. A clear influence on such auteurs as Martin Scorsese, Fat City is screening December 28 at 6:00 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image series “See It Big! Great Cinematographers,” which continues through December 29 with such other beautifully shot films as The Godfather, Persona, and Doctor Zhivago.

CHRIS BURDEN: EXTREME MEASURES

Chris Burden’s “1 Ton Crane Truck” dangles heavy object in lobby gallery (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Wednesday – Sunday through January 12, $10-$16 (pay-what-you-wish Thursdays 7:00 – 9:00)
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org

The New Museum has given itself over to performance and installation artist Chris Burden for “Extreme Measures,” his first major U.S. museum retrospective in more than a quarter century, comprising works across five floors, on the building’s facade, and even on the inaccessible roof. The Boston-born, L.A.-based Burden, who received his BA from Pomona College in visual arts, physics, and architecture and whose father was an engineer, incorporates all of those disciplines and more in the show, which continues through January 12. Burden takes things to extremes with installations that were challenging just to get into the museum, including “1 Ton Crane Truck,” a fully restored 1964 Ford F350 that resides in the lobby gallery, dangling a handmade one-ton cast-iron weight; “Twin Quasi Legal Skyscrapers,” a pair of four-ton structures that required a special addition to the roof in order to hold them; “Ghost Ship,” a two-ton, thirty-foot handcrafted sixareen sailboat suspended on the front of the building, its unmanned four-hundred-mile trip documented in the lobby; “Porsche with Meteorite,” a bright yellow two-and-a-half-ton restored 1974 Porsche 914 balanced against a nearly four-hundred-pound rock fragment from space; and “The Big Wheel,” a three-ton cast-iron flywheel that is powered by a 1968 Benelli 250cc motorcycle. (“The Big Wheel” is activated Wednesday – Sunday at 11:30 and 2:30 and 7:30 on Thursday.)

Chris Burden, “Porsche with Meteorite,” restored 1974 Porsche with 390-pound meteorite, steel frame, 5,025 pounds, 2013 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The massive, carefully constructed pieces display Burden’s unique approach particularly to transportation, employing technological and found objects involved with small- and large-scale movement, something that becomes even clearer on the third floor, which features the stainless-steel “Triple 21 Foot Truss Bridge,” the concrete “Three Arch Dry Stock Bridge, ¼ Scale,” the reverse-arched “Mexican Bridge,” and “Tyne Bridge Kit,” a multidrawer chest that reveals some of Burden’s working process, along with “Pair of Namur Mortars,” two beautifully detailed full-size three-ton cannons with cannonballs, the type of weapon that could be used to blow up bridges in olden times. (The smaller bridges also recall the six-story structure “What My Dad Gave Me” that Burden raised in Rockefeller Center in 2008.) Burden investigates the theme of war, power, and authority on the second floor with “L.A.P.D. Uniforms,” fully outfitted, oversized replicas created in response to the Rodney King beating; “Beehive Bunker,” a conical bunker constructed of cement still in its store-bought bags; “All the Submarines of the United States of America,” consisting of 625 miniature cardboard submarines hanging from the ceiling, representing all of the subs launched by the navy between 1897 and 1987, accompanied by a board that identifies each one; and “A Tale of Two Cities,” a spectacularly elaborate battle scene between two warring city-states, built with sand, live plants, more than five thousand children’s toys, and bullets, best viewed with binoculars.

Chris Burden, detail, “A Tale of Two Cities,” two miniature cities with approx. five thousand toys, sand, plants, boulders, approx. 53,000 lbs., 1981 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Each work is accompanied by new or old text from Burden, shedding light on the piece in various ways; for example, for “Rant,” the artist explains, “An extreme close-up of my face is projected onto a wall, several times larger than life-size. Assuming the persona of a ranting xenophobic preacher, I deliver a short, intense monologue in French.” Also on view are eleven of Burden’s seminal performance-art videos (among them “Shoot,” “Bed Piece,” “Deadman,” and “Fire Roll”); three short films documenting his “Beam Drops,” in which he drops dozens of I-beams vertically into wet cement; and “Tower of Power,” which calls into question the whole nature of the value of art, both as commodity and visual pleasure, by allowing one person at a time to view a pyramid of one hundred gold bars surrounded by matchstick men, guarded by an armed NYPD detective. There’s something fundamentally satisfying about “Extreme Measures,” both on its surface and lurking just beneath it, resulting in a vastly pleasurable, thoroughly unusual museum experience.

CINEMATIC SITES: NEIGHBORING SOUNDS

Brazilian Oscar hopeful NEIGHBORING SOUNDS examines changing community in changing times

NEIGHBORING SOUNDS (O SOM AO REDOR) (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2011)
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Friday, December 27, free with museum admission of $22, 3:00
212-423-3587
www.cinemaguild.com
www.guggenheim.org

Inspired by actual events that took place in his hometown of Recife, Brazil, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighboring Sounds is an engaging slice-of-life examination of class differences and a community in the midst of social and economic change. When Clodoaldo (Irandhir Santos) and Fernando (Nivaldo Nascimento) go door-to-door offering their services as overnight security guards protecting the street, only Francisco (W. J. Solha), an aging, wealthy sugar baron who owns much of the surrounding property, and his grandson João (Gustavo Jahn) refuse to participate in the shady proposal, but Francisco insists that they keep their hands off another of his grandsons, Dinho (Yuri Holanda), who is responsible for a spate of car-stereo robberies. This suburban neighborhood, ever more in the architectural shadow of bigger high rises going up all around them, is filled with little secrets and minor resentments. A mechanic keys an expensive car when the owner is rude to him. Clodoaldo and a maid (Clébia Souza) make use of a fancy gated house he is taking care of while the owners are away. Sisters fight over the size of a flat-screen television. And a co-op board wants to fire their longtime night watchman without a severance package because he has taken to napping on the job. Meanwhile, João, who has two children by the daughter of the family’s maid, has started a relationship with the more acceptable Sofia (Irma Brown), but the privileged João still lives in the past; when he shows an apartment in one of Francisco’s condos, he points out what would be the maid’s room, assuming everyone can afford domestic help. And Bia (Meve Jinkings) finds a different kind of domestic help, buying large quantities of pot from the water guy, finding unique ways to deal with her neighbor’s howling dog, and using household appliances to pleasure herself. A film critic who has previously made documentaries, Filho, who wrote, directed, and coedited (with João Maria) Neighboring Sounds, has populated his debut full-length feature with believable characters caught up in realistic situations, along with just the right dose of black comedy. The film was shot with natural sound at a relaxed pace, inviting viewers into this intriguing fictional tale filled with real-world implications, involving a decaying past and modern issues of safety and surveillance. While João might be the moral conscious of the story, it is Jinkings’s Bia who steals this small gem of a film, her unique methods of daily survival a joy to behold. Neighboring Sounds is screening December 27 at 3:00 as part of the Guggenheim Museum program “Cinematic Sites” and will be introduced at 2:45 by series organizer Paul Dallas; the screening is being held in conjunction with the exhibition “Participatory City: 100 Urban Trends from the BMW Guggenheim Lab,” which continues through January 5, when Wu Tsang’s Wildness will be shown. You can also catch the film on December 31 at 5:15 and January 1 at 8:30 at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “For Your Consideration: Foreign Oscar Hopefuls.”