ARTERIES OF A NATION reinvestigates the America of 1863 in site-specific, interactive performance in Brooklyn Bridge Park
Brooklyn Bridge Park, Squibb Park & Pier 1
Sunday, July 23, free, 7:00
www.renegadepg.com
Brooklyn-based Renegade Performance Group looks back to a terrible time 150 years ago in their site-specific piece Arteries of a Nation. Using sound and movement, RPG artistic director and choreographer André M. Zachery, composer Vincent Burwell, and writer Brook Stephenson examine three events that took place in July 1863: the Battle of Gettysburg, the New York City Draft Riots, and the attack of the all-black 54th Massachusetts Voluntary Infantry Regiment on Fort Wagner. The immersive work will be performed July 21 at 7:30 in Brooklyn Bridge Park, traveling from Squibb Playground to Pier 1, exploring such concepts as race and equality, still so central, and controversial in light of the Trayvon Martin case and the recent fight over the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The interactive piece, which also features the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Youth Ensemble, takes on added significance by being held on the Brooklyn pier, which played a role in the draft riots and the Civil War.
Yasujirō Ozu’s first film in color, at the studio’s request, is another engagingly told exploration of the changing relationship between parents and children, the traditional and the modern, in postwar Japan. Both funny and elegiac, Equinox Flower opens with businessman Wataru Hirayama (Shin Saburi) giving a surprisingly personal speech at a friend’s daughter’s wedding, explaining that he is envious that the newlyweds are truly in love, as opposed to his marriage, which was arranged for him and his wife, Kiyoko (Kinuyo Tanaka). Hirayama is later approached by an old middle school friend, Mikami (Ozu regular Chishu Ryu), who wants him to speak with his daughter, Fumiko (Yoshiko Kuga), who has left home to be with a man against her father’s will. Meanwhile, Yukiko (Fujiko Yamamoto), a friend of Hirayama’s elder daughter, Setsuko (Ineko Arima), is constantly being set up by her gossipy mother, Hatsu (Chieko Naniwa). Hirayama does not seem to be instantly against what Fumiko and Yukiko want for themselves, but when a young salaryman named Taniguchi (Keiji Sada) asks Hirayama for permission to marry his older daughter, Setsuko (Ineko Arima), Hirayama stands firmly against their wedding, claiming that he will decide Setsuko’s future. “Can’t I find my own happiness?” Setsuko cries out. The widening gap between father and daughter represents the modernization Japan is experiencing, but the past is always close at hand; Ozu and longtime cowriter Kōgo Noda even have Taniguchi being transferred to Hiroshima, the scene of such tragedy and devastation. Yet there is still a lighthearted aspect to Equinox Flower, and Ozu and cinematographer Yuharu Atsuta embrace the use of color, including beautiful outdoor scenes of Hirayama and Kiyoko looking out across a river and mountain, a train station sign warning of dangerous winds, the flashing neon RCA Victor building, and laundry floating against a cloudy blue sky. The interiors are carefully designed as well, with objects of various colors arranged like still-life paintings, particularly a red teapot that shows up in numerous shots. And Kiyoko’s seemingly offhanded adjustment of a broom hanging on the wall is unforgettable. But at the center of it all is Saburi’s marvelously gentle performance as a proud man caught between the past, the present, and the future. Equinox Flower is screening July 23 at Film Forum, which is holding a “Reprise Presentation” of its earlier, extensive Ozu series with encore screenings of eight of the works, concluding with Tokyo Twilight and 
Back in 1993, writer-director Wong Kar-wai’s Ashes of Time was released, a thinking man’s martial arts epic inspired by Jin Yong’s The Eagle-Shooting Heroes novels. With numerous versions in circulation and the original negatives in disrepair, Wong (Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love) decided to painstakingly reedit and restore the film fifteen years later, renaming it Ashes of Time Redux. The plot – which is still as confusing as ever — revolves around Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung), a loner who lives in the desert, where people come to him when they need someone taken care of. Every year he is visited by Huang Yaoshi (Tony Leung Ka Fai), who keeps him informed of the world outside jianghu — especially about his lost love (Maggie Cheung). Meanwhile, Murong Yang (Brigitte Lin) has demanded that Ouyang kill Huang for having jilted his sister, Murong Yin (also played by Lin), who in turn hires Ouyang to kill Yang. There’s also a blind swordsman (Tony Leung Chiu Wai), a peasant girl with a basket of eggs (Charlie Young), a poor, rogue swordsman (Jacky Cheung), and a bottle of magic wine that can erase memories. Or something like that. But what’s most impressive about Ashes of Time Redux is Christopher Doyle’s thrilling, swirling cinematography, which sweeps the audience into the film, and Wu Tong’s rearranged score, based on the original music by Frankie Chan and Roel A. Garcia and featuring soaring cello solos by Yo-Yo Ma. The film is screening July 21 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image series “Wong Kar-wai,” which continues with such other works by the Hong Kong Second Wave auteur as Days of Being Wild, As Tears Go By, In the Mood for Love, 2046, and his latest, The Grandmaster, for a special “Fist and Sword” event with Wong present.
Bud Cort (Harold) and Ruth Gordon (Maude) are magnificent in this glorious black comedy from director Hal Ashby (The Last Detail, Shampoo, Being There) and writer Colin Higgins (Foul Play, 9 to 5). Harold is an eighteen-year-old rich kid obsessed with death, regularly flirting with suicide. Maude is a fun-loving, free-spirited senior citizen approaching her eightieth birthday. Ashby throws in just the right amount of post-1960s social commentary, including a very funny antiwar scene, without becoming overbearing, as this could have been a maudlin piece of sentimental claptrap, but instead it’s far from it. Even the Cat Stevens soundtrack (“If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out,” “Tea for the Tillerman,” “Where Do the Children Play?”) works. Harold and Maude is a tender, uproarious, bittersweet tale that is one of the best of its kind, completely unforgettable, enlightening, and, ultimately, life-affirming in its own odd way. Harold and Maude is screening in a DCP projection July 22 at 8:00 as part of the IFC Center series “Queer/Art/Film” and will be followed by a discussion with Chilean multidisciplinary artist, musician, and director Sebastián Silva (Crystal Fairy, Iwannawin & Friends). The monthly series, which consists of films selected by gay New York City artists, concludes August 19 with Stephen Frears’s My Beautiful Laundrette, picked by Brooklyn-born visual artist Chitra Ganesh.
“There are some stories which we are not only an audience to, but may become their participants,” Canadian journalist Joe Schlesinger says at the beginning of Matej Mináč and Patrik Pašš’s poignant, powerful documentary Nicky’s Family. Schlesinger is one of hundreds of Czech and Slovak men and women who, as children, were saved from the Nazis by unassuming Englishman Nicholas Winton on the eve of World War II. Winton’s story remained virtually unknown for sixty years, until his wife found a suitcase in the attic filled with documentation detailing her husband’s quiet heroism. Over the last fifteen years, the “British Schindler” has been celebrated around the world, being knighted by the queen, meeting many of the people he helped save, and inspiring children who are not directly part of “Nicky’s Family” to help others in what is called the “Winton virus of good.” It’s an unforgettable story centered around a man who didn’t set out to be a hero and still appears to be somewhat uncomfortable with all the accolades, which include being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The film interviews such members of Nicky’s Family as Alice Masters, Ben Abeles, Liesl Silverstone, Dr. Lenata Laxova, Tom Berman, and Tom Schrecker, who have made significant contributions to society that might have never happened had they not been rescued as children by Winton. Director-producer-cowriter Mináč and producer-cowriter-editor Pašš include unnecessary staged re-creations of some of the events of 1938 that actually detract from the central narrative, and the documentary overplays the emotional card in its final scenes, but it tells a story that needs to be told, of a remarkable man who, even at age 104, continues to be an inspiration and proves that one person can indeed make a difference.