this week in film and television

EVERYTHING IS A MOVIE: MOI-MÊME AT SEGAL FEST

Mojo Lorwin finishes his father’s film, Moi-même, after more than half a century

MOI-MÊME (Mojo Lorwin & Lee Breuer, 1968/2024)
Segal Center Film Festival on Theater and Performance
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Saturday, May 17, $10– $14, 3:00
Festival runs May 15– 28
www.thesegalcenter.org
www.anthologyfilmarchives.org

In 1968, experimental theater director, playwright, and poet Lee Breuer began making a black-and-white improvised film during the May 1968 Paris riots, where he was living at the time. He and cinematographer John Rounds shot the footage but never added sound, edited it, or wrote a script. In 1970, Breuer cofounded the seminal New York City company Mabou Mines with Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, JoAnne Akalaitis, David Warrilow, and Frederick Neumann, winning numerous Obies among other accolades over the next half century, but he never finished the movie, which itself is about making a movie.

Breuer died in January 2021 at the age of eighty-three; one of his children, Mojo Lorwin, decided to complete the project, hiring voice actors and musicians and serving as writer, director, editor, and producer. The result is the hilarious Nouvelle Vague satire Moi-même (“Myself”), a sixty-five-minute foray into the world of François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Jean-Pierre Melville, Agnès Varda, William Klein, and Jean-Luc Godard, who makes a cameo, walking backward as Kevin shares a series of statements ending with “Everything is a movie.”

Kevin Mathewson stars as Kevin (voiced in 2024 by Declan Kenneally), an adolescent who is making a film with his alter ego (Patrick Martin). As he proceeds around town, he meets up with a strange driver (executive producer Russ Moro / 2024 composer Olivier Conan), a movie producer (Frederick Neumann / David Neumann, Frederick’s son), a starlet (Ginger Hall / Clove Galilee, Breuer and Maleczech’s daughter), the son of a baron (Warrilow / David Neumann), an Italian heiress (Renata / Tessie Herrasti), a revolutionary actress (Anna Backer / Tiera Lopper), her replacement (Judy Mathewson, Kevin’s younger sister / Ruma Breuer, Lee’s granddaughter), a sleazy agent (Mark Smith / Alon Andrews), a couple of goons (Pippo and Mike Trane / Frier McCollister), and the owner of a film shop (Lee Pampf / Thomas Cabus). He is often accompanied by his conscience (Maleczech / Alexandra Zelman-Doring) as he faces financial and creative crises.

Lorwin has fun with cinematic and societal tropes while maintaining the underground, DIY feel; for example, he doesn’t match the dialogue exactly to the movement of the characters’ mouths as they make such proclamations as “The movies aren’t fair,” “The movies are a game and everyone who plays is a cheater,” and “All I want is to be seen and heard.” The soundtrack consists of unexpected sound effects and songs and music by Frank LoCastro, Alex Klimovitsky, Eliot Krimsky, Conan, and others.

There’s lots of drinking and smoking, violent shootings, political ranting, discussions of art and love, vapid gatherings, a heist, a touch of psychedelia, and superfluous nudity, nearly everything you could possibly want in a French film.

“Film costs money, more than you’ve got,” the driver barks at Kevin. “Producers are perverts,” Kevin tells the actress while preparing a baby bottle of milk. Unable to afford film reels, Kevin says, “Film is more expensive than love and revolution.”

Describing the film to the agent, Kevin explains, “Here it is: It’s me, but it’s not me. You dig? I mean, it’s the film adaptation of me. I just need a little bread to turn boring old me into moi-même. Feels like doors are finally opening for me.” He delivers the last line as a door opens in front of him.

Perhaps the most important line of dialogue is given to Kevin from a man on the street, who tells him, “There are no rules.” I would add, “Viva la revolución!”

Moi-même is being shown May 17 at 3:00 at Anthology Film Archives as part of the Segal Center Film Festival on Theater and Performance, followed by a Q&A with Lorwin (Summer in the City, 2020 Brooklyn Film Festival) and Kevin Mathewson, moderated by Segal Center executive director Frank Hentschker. The festival runs May 15– 28 at Anthology and the CUNY Graduate Center and includes such other presentations as the North American premiere of Aniela Gabryel’s Radical Move, the US premiere of Sophie Fiennes’s Acting, Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane’s Grand Theft Hamlet, and a Richard Foreman retrospective.

Meanwhile, Mabou Mines (The Lost Ones, The Gospel at Colonus, Dollhouse) is still going strong; their latest piece, This Like a Dream Keeps Other Time, is playing May 15– 18 at their East Village home, @122CC.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

LIFE IS LIKE A BOX OF MATZAH: MOST PEOPLE DIE ON SUNDAYS

A Jewish family in Buenos Aires faces death and desperation in Most People Die on Sundays

MOST PEOPLE DIE ON SUNDAYS (LOS DOMINGOS MUEREN MÁS PERSONAS) (Iair Said, 2024)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, May 2
quadcinema.com

In his 2019 debut feature-length documentary, Flora’s Life Is No Picnic, Buenos Aires–born filmmaker Iair Said looked at his concern about his great-aunt Flora’s apartment; he was hoping that she would leave it to him in her will, but instead she planned to donate it to the Weizmann Institute of Science.

In his 2024 debut feature-length narrative film, Most People Die on Sundays, writer-director Said stars as David, a thirtysomething man-child who who can’t find his place in a world he doesn’t know how to navigate. Inspired by the death of Said’s father, the story follows David as he returns home to Buenos Aires for the funeral of his uncle. David has been in Italy for a year studying, of all things, communication; he could not be more awkward speaking with others, be it his beloved mother, Dora (Rita Cortese), his sister, Silvia (Juliana Gattas), his cousin, Elisa (Antonia Zegers), or anybody else, from his driving instructor to his mother’s next-door neighbor to a flight attendant — to his own father, who lies in a coma at a clinic.

Queer, Jewish, and schlubby, David moves slowly, talks slowly, and thinks slowly, his face almost always in a deadpan stare, resembling Jimmy Kimmel mixed with Fatty Arbuckle. David keeps finding ways to avoid visiting his father even as the family discusses euthanasia — as well as ways to afford his uncle’s funeral and burial.

David is far from oblivious to what is happening; he just seems unable to take reasonable action, wandering through life in a kind of haze, relying on others to take care of him.

“I think I am a little sad,” he narrates as he goes through a battery of health tests. “To be back home, to have to live with my mom. . . . The house is somehow in bad shape. I feel bad for her. She is so alone. My dad’s condition is not going to change. He is practically dead. Him dying means all of us are going to die too, that everything has an ending. I can’t imagine living my life without him. If Dad remains like that for many years, my mom will not get to know anyone else, she won’t stop looking after him . . . That is a lot for her. I chose to be alone. She hasn’t.”

David might say that he chooses to be alone, but as Said shows particularly in the first and last scenes, that is actually the last thing David wants.

Most People Die on Sundays moves at the pace of David’s mind, slowly yet earnestly, with a subtle, carnivalesque score by Ascari that mimics David’s stunted emotional understanding and often pathetic, sad-sack choices. He is terrified of death, be it that of others or his own, and it haunts his thoughts. He is so desperate to be loved that he comes close to stalking several men he is attracted to. Just about the only time the family has any fun is during a Passover seder, where the wine is spoiled and David complains that the fish smells, well, like fish.

Earlier, Dora gives a doctor at the clinic some matzah, telling him, “It’s an unleavened, unsalted flatbread, but it’s tasty. If you want to be a Jew, you must know how to suffer.” The doctor asks her what happened and she answers with a dejected, downtrodden look, “My son’s back.”

David and Most People Die on Sundays are like a whole box of matzah.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

FOOTBALL AS AMERICA: MATTHEW BARNEY AT METROGRAPH

Matthew Barney’s multichannel Secondary will be shown on a single screen at Metrograph (image © Matthew Barney, courtesy of the artist, Gladstone Gallery, Sadie Coles HQ, Regen Projects, and Galerie Max Hetzler)

SECONDARY
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Saturday, May 3, 5:00
metrograph.com
secondary.matthewbarney.net
online slideshow

It was the hit heard round the world.

On August 12, 1978, the New England Patriots were playing a preseason game against the Oakland Raiders at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum. Late in the second quarter, the Pats have a third and eight at the Raiders twenty-four-yard line. QB Steve Grogan calls the 94 Slant, and wide receiver Darryl Stingley heads downfield. At the ten-yard line, Stingley reaches for the overthrown pass and is crushed in midair by two-time Raiders All-Pro safety Jack Tatum, known as the Assassin for his punishing style of play. Stingley immediately crumples to the ground. Four Oakland defenders look down at Stingley and walk away; Patriots wide receiver Russ Francis stands over his fallen teammate, knowing something is wrong. The twenty-six-year-old Stingley is wheeled off the field on a stretcher, a quadriplegic for the rest of his life; he died in 2007 at the age of fifty-five. Tatum wasn’t penalized on the play and never apologized to Stingley, claiming it was a legal hit and that he had done nothing wrong. Tatum, who died in 2010 at the age of sixty-one, was also involved in the Immaculate Reception on December 23, 1972, in a playoff game against the Steelers; with twenty-two seconds left and Pittsburgh down by one, future Hall of Famer Terry Bradshaw was facing a fourth and ten from his own forty. He ran to his right and threw a pass down the middle. Tatum smashed into Steelers running back Frenchy Fuqua, the ball popped up into the air, and future Hall of Famer Franco Harris picked it up by his shoestrings and ran forty yards into the end zone for the winning score.

Filmmaker and installation artist Matthew Barney was eleven years old when Tatum pummeled Stingley. Seeing the collision over and over again on replay did not prevent Barney from becoming a star quarterback in high school in Idaho. But at Yale, he switched from sports to art, beginning his “Drawing Restraint” series in 1987 and making his Jim Otto Suite in 1991–92, about orifices, bodily fluids, energy, Harry Houdini, and Raiders Hall of Fame center Jim Otto, who wore the number double zero, mimicking the letters at the beginning and end of his palindromic last name.

Violence in football takes center stage as a metaphor for America in Matthew Barney’s Secondary (image courtesy Matthew Barney Studio, © Matthew Barney / photo by Julieta Cervantes)

In 2023, Barney said farewell to his longtime Long Island City studio with Secondary, a five-channel video installation that used the Tatum-Stingley play to explore violence in athletic competition. Barney transformed the studio, which was right on the East River, into a football stadium, with a long, artificial turf surface divided into geometric patterns of different colors, centered by his “Field Emblem,” his Cremaster logo, an ellipse with a line going through it, evoking –0-. There were monitors in all four corners of the field, along with a three-sided mini-jumbotron hanging from the ceiling. Visitors could sit on the field or a bench; there was also a painting on the wall, an owners booth filled with football paraphernalia, and a ditch with broken piping and mud dug into the concrete. Outside, on the facade facing the water, there was a digital countdown clock next to graffiti that said, “Saboroso,” which means “delicious.”

Written and directed by Barney, photographed by Soren Nielsen, and edited by Kate Williams, the film — which lasts sixty minutes, the length of a football game — has now been reimagined on a single screen, where it will be shown at Metrograph on May 3 at 5:00, in conjunction with the publication of a two-volume companion book (Rizzoli, April 2025, $115), featuring contributions from Eric Banks, Jonathan Bepler, Raven Chacon, Mark Godfrey, Juliette Lecorne, Helen Marten, Maggie Nelson, and David Thomson; Barney will be at Metrograph for a postscreening discussion with book editor Louise Neri and Banks, followed by a reception with signed books available for purchase.

The multichannel version kicks off with indigenous rights activist Jacquelyn Deshchidn, a Two-Spirit Chiricahua Apache and Isleta Pueblo soprano, composer, poet, and public speaker, performing an alternate national anthem, a none-too-subtle jab at a league that still has teams using offensive Native American names and imagery. The cast, primarily consisting of dancers and choreographers, features movement director David Thomson as Stingley; Raphael Xavier as Tatum; Shamar Watt as Raiders safety Lester “the Molester” Hayes; Wally Cardona as Grogan; Ted Johnson as Francis; Isabel Crespo Pardo, Kyoko Kitamura, and Jeffrey Gavett as the line judges and referees; Barney as Raiders Hall of Fame QB Ken “the Snake” Stabler, who died of colon cancer but was discovered to have had high Stage 3 chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the disease that affects so many football players, brought on by getting hit so much in the head; and Thomas Kopache as Raiders owner Al Davis, whose motto was “Just win, baby,” no matter the cost. (Football fans will also notice cameos by actors portraying such Raiders favorites as wide receiver Fred Biletnikoff and defensive end John “the Tooz” Matuszak, who became an actor and died in 1989 at the age of thirty-eight from an opioid overdose.) The actors are generally much older than the people they represent, several of whom never made it to the age the performers are today.

The experimental film does not have a traditional chronological narrative; instead, Barney focuses on Tatum, Hayes, and Stingley training in slow motion in equipment rooms as if preparing for a ballet, Grogan making a football out of a gooey substance and then practicing with it, members of Raiders Nation shouting and cheering in fierce black-and-silver Halloween-like costumes, and players venturing into the muddy ditch, the broken pipe echoing Stingley’s shattered body. The music, by sound designer Jonathan Bepler, envelops the audience in a parade of noises, from hums and breathing to clangs and screams. Shots of the Manhattan skyline and the East River beckon to another life outside. The screens sometimes display the same footage, while other times they are different; it is like the viewer is at a football game, with the choice whether to watch the quarterback, the defensive alignment, or other fans in the stands. There is no actual pigskin in the film.

Matthew Barney turned his LIC studio into a multimedia installation (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The game of football has always been lionized for its violence. Even as the league changes rules to try to protect the quarterback, kick returners, and receivers, the sports networks repeatedly show brutal hits like the one on Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa against the Cincinnati Bengals that resulted in severe head and neck injuries. When we think of Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann, the first thing we remember is the career-ending injury he suffered on Monday Night Football in 1985 at the hands of New York Giants linebackers Lawrence Taylor and Harry Carson, brutally shattering his leg, and not his 1982–83 MVP season when he led his team to a Super Bowl victory over the Dolphins.

But Barney (River of Fundament, “Subliming Vessel”) is not merely commenting on football. Secondary is about America itself, its rituals and celebrations, its embracing of violence on and off the field. It’s about our lack of respect for the human body and one another, about a country torn apart into blue and red states like opposing teams, ready to do whatever is necessary to just win, baby.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

DEMOCRACY IN ACTION: EMERGENT CITY, INNOVATION, AND THE BROOKLYN WATERFONT

Documentary traces community battle against rezoning of Industry City in Brooklyn

EMERGENT CITY (Jay Arthur Sterrenberg & Kelly Anderson, 2024)
DCTV Firehouse Cinema
87 Lafayette St.
Opens Friday, April 25
www.dctvny.org
www.emergentcitydoc.com

“Everybody wants to live, work, shop, spend money in Brooklyn,” real estate journalist Michael Stoler said in a July 2012 episode of The Stoler Report. “Why’s everybody want Brooklyn?”

Carlos Scissura of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce responded, “Look, there’s no other place in America that anyone should be, period.”

That exchange kicks off Emergent City, Jay Arthur Sterrenberg and Kelly Anderson’s documentary tracking the rezoning battle of Industry City, comprising sixteen buildings on the Brooklyn waterfront, from the time that developers started buying up property there after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy in the fall of 2012 through the end of 2022, when a decision was ultimately reached.

Sterrenberg and Anderson are flies on the wall during a seemingly endless series of meetings, town halls, protests, hearings, and other gatherings over the course of ten years, during which Industry City CEO Andrew Kimball and attorney Jesse Masyr, backed by such billion-dollar companies as Jamestown and Belvedere Capital and real estate investor Angela Gordon, defend their plan to rezone the Sunset Park industrial waterfront for commercial and retail use and luxury hotels.

The fight against the project, as it goes through the six-stage approval process — Scoping, Certification, Community Board, Borough President, Planning Commission, and City Council — is led by tenant organizer Marcela Mitaynes, later the Community Board 7 house chair; Antoinette Martinez of the Protect Our Working Waterfront Alliance; Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Development Corporation executive director Ben Margolis; UPROSE Climate Justice Center executive director Elizabeth Yeampierre; Community Board 7 land use chair John Fontillas and chair César Zuñiga; city council director of land use and planning Renae Widdison; and others.

Caught in the middle is city councilmember Carlos Menchaca, who is trying to negotiate a community benefits agreement that will make both sides happy, which appears to be an impossible task.

“How do you retain the working-class character of the community, how do you keep it a walk-to-work community and keep it industrial, but not at the expense of our lives?” Yeampierre asks, noting that “catastrophic events are heading our way.”

Trying to find perspective, Margolis says, “It’s not that this is the ideal scenario. The ideal scenario is that the waterfront is owned by the city, and everybody can choose how to make it work. That’s just not the reality.”

Kimball refers to the area as an “innovation district,” talking to several local small business owners who have decided to lease space in Industry City, seeing it as a boon for the community, while others argue that it will invariably lead to higher rents, gentrification, and displacement.

Finally, after a decade of contentious and volatile discussion, a surprising resolution settles the matter.

A vivid portrait of democracy in action, with all its flaws and inherent prominence of power, money, and politics, Emergent City opens April 25 at DCTV Firehouse Cinema, with eight postscreening Q&As through May 1 featuring Sterrenberg and Anderson and such guests as Menchaca, Widdison, Mitaynes, Martinez, cinematographer Alex Mallis, executive producer Stephen Maing, field producer Betty Yu, city councilmember Alexa Avilés, and moderators Max Rivlin-Nadler, Oscar Perry Abello, Siddhant Adlakha, Alyssa Katz, and Firehouse Cinema director of programming Dara Messinger

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

FINDING LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS: FOR THE LIVING AT THE JCC

Holocaust survivor Marcel Zielinski revisits Auschwitz with his granddaughter, Chen, in For the Living

FOR THE LIVING (Marc Bennett & Tim Roper, 2024)
Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan
334 Amsterdam Ave. at West Seventy-Sixth St.
Thursday, April 24, $19.95, 7:00
www.jccmanhattan.org
www.forthelivingmovie.com

“When considering the question, What makes us human?, we must also ask, What might render us less than human? And more importantly, What makes us inhumane?” narrator Tim Roper says at the beginning of For the Living, a powerful and important documentary he codirected with Marc Bennett.

Near the end of the film, Yale professor and On Tyranny author Timothy Snyder points out, “Recognizing that someone else is a human being is a really demandingly high threshold. If you can get to that, then a lot of other problems will solve themselves.”

In the documentary, which is having a special screening April 24 at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan on the Upper West Side, Roper and Bennett use the 2019 Ride for the Living as the centerpiece of their exploration of dehumanization and genocide and the need for empathy and compassion.

In 2014, software developer and long-range cyclist Robert Desmond traced the liberation path, a twenty-five-day, 1,350-mile bike ride from London to Auschwitz, stopping off at historic locations related to WWII and, more specifically, the Holocaust. The next year, Desmond, a British Jew, established the Ride for the Living, in which groups of bikers travel from Auschwitz to Krakow, following the rode that ten-year-old Marcel Zielinski and many others walked after being freed from the concentration camp in 1945. Zielinski became a regular rider at the annual event, establishing a close relationship with Desmond; despite their age gap of more than fifty years, they consider themselves brothers.

The film cuts between the preparation for the 2019 Ride for the Living, archival Holocaust footage, and brief explorations of twentieth-century genocides in Turkey, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda as well as the treatment of Indigenous peoples in what would become America and African slavery.

Zielinski returns to his childhood home and visits Auschwitz with his granddaughter, Chen, sharing terrifying details of what he experienced. Bernard Offen, who survived five camps as a child and lost fifty-nine members of his family in the Holocaust, emphasizes how important it is to tell the story, a critical theme through the film.

Rabbi Michael Paley notes, “We shouldn’t come as tourists just to see [Auschwitz]; we should come as witnesses, we should bear witness.” Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz demands, “Crimes against humanity should not be tolerated.”

Krakow Jewish Community Center CEO and ride participant Jonathan Ornstein explains, “The most important message is not being a bystander, they say. There will always be good people, and there will always be bad people, and I think the way the world goes is largely dependent on the ones in the middle.”

Roper and Bennett also speak with Zimbabwe genocide survivor and international human rights lawyer Gugulethu Moyo, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum founding project director Rabbi Michael Berenbaum, USC Shoah Foundation executive director emeritus Stephen Smith, Emory psychology professor emeritus Frans de Waal, University of Illinois at Chicago social emotional learning chair Kimberly Schonert-Reichl, and Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt.

In the latter part of the 117-minute film, the focus turns to dehumanization and antisemitism, as practiced by the Nazis and even world leaders today, referencing how Hitler was influenced by America’s belief in manifest destiny, a concept that is now being practiced by Vladimir Putin in Russia and the current US administration.

“I grew up thinking that we learned the lessons of the Holocaust, and I’ll say living here, in the heart of Europe for eighteen years, that I don’t think those lessons were learned,” Ornstein says. “With antisemitism on the rise, with Holocaust denial on the rise, I’m shocked by things that happen all around Europe; I’m shocked by things that happen in the United States.”

University of New England philosophy professor David Livingstone Smith explains, “There are great advantages to be reaped by doing bad things to others, by exterminating them,” adding that in certain “circumstances, with the psychology we have, very many of us would yield to that way of thinking.”

And astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson posits, “It’s pretty clear when you look at the history of atrocities, it’s not just simply hatred; it’s like a psychological delusion that has to be put into place so that you can carry this out on a large scale.”

The film — which opens with Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere” and concludes with Joan Osborne’s version of Bruce Springsteen’s more hopeful “Further On Up the Road” — was made prior to the current administration, but it’s hard not to think about what is happening right now in the United States involving illegal immigrants, deportation, and antisemitism. Words such as dehumanization and empathy are again being discussed every day.

“It’s bigger than a Jewish thing; this is a human tragedy,” Desmond says.

And it’s far from over.

Roper, Bennett, and producer Lisa Effress will participate in a Q&A following the 7:00 screening at the JCC. The film is also being shown April 23 at 6:30 at Iona University in New Rochelle before traveling to festivals in Dubuque, Boulder, Flint, Detroit, and the Berkshires. The next Ride for the Living is scheduled for June 25–29; registration is now open.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

HOLEY CINEMA: TRIPLE CANOPY PRESENTS DECASIA AND MORE AT BAM

Bill Morrison’s Decasia concludes BAM/Triple Canopy series on holes

DECASIA (Bill Morrison, 2002)
BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Thursday, April 24, 9:15
Series runs April 18-24
www.bam.org
canopycanopycanopy.com

Experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison’s production company is called Hypnotic Pictures, and for good reason: The Chicago-born, New York–based auteur makes mesmerizing, visually arresting works using archival found footage and eclectic soundtracks that are a treat for the eyes and ears. Made in 2002, Decasia is about nothing less than the beginning and end of cinema. The sixty-seven-minute work features clips from early silent movies that are often barely visible in the background as the film nitrate disintegrates in the foreground, black-and-white psychedelic blips, blotches, and burns dominating the screen. The eyes at first do a dance between the two distinct parts, trying to follow the action of the original works as well as the abstract shapes caused by the filmstrip’s impending death, but eventually the two meld into a single unique narrative, enhanced by a haunting, compelling score by Bang on a Can’s Michael Gordon, which begins as a minimalist soundtrack and builds slowly until it reaches a frantic conclusion. The onscreen destruction might seem random, but it is actually carefully choreographed by Morrison (The Miners’ Hymns, The Great Flood), who wrote, directed, produced, and edited the film.

The first twenty-first-century film to be added to the National Film Registry, Decasia is screening April 24 at BAM Rose Cinemas, concluding “Triple Canopy Presents: In the Hole,” the fifth collaboration between BAM and the magazine; running April 18–24, the series, guest-curated by Yasmina Price, focuses on “films about openings and absences.” Among the other works being screened are Andrew Davis’s Holes, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, Georges Franju’s Eyes without a Face, and Raoul Peck’s Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

DRIFTING THROUGH TIME: LEE KANG-SHENG AT METROGRAPH

Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng) has a thing about time in Tsai Ming-liang film

WHAT TIME IS IT THERE? (NI NA BIAN JI DIAN) (Tsai Ming-liang, 2001)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Monday, April 21, 4:40
Series runs April 19 – May 4
212-660-0312
metrograph.com

Malaysian-born Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time Is It There? is one heck of an existential hoot. When his father (Miao Tien) dies, Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng), who sells watches on the street in Taipei, becomes obsessed with a series of things: a strange woman (Chen Shiang-chyi) who insists on buying Hsiao-kang’s own watch and then leaves for Paris; François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Tsai’s “all-time favorite film”); urinating in whatever is near his bed instead of going to the bathroom; and changing clocks to Paris time. Meanwhile, his mother (Lu Yi-ching) is determined to follow ridiculous rituals to bring her husband back, and the woman in Paris (Cecilia Yip) goes through a number of bizarre events as well. There is not a single camera movement in the film (except for in the 400 Blows film clips); the scenes are shot by Benoît Delhomme in long takes, often lingering before and after any action — when there is any action. The dialogue is spare, ironic, and hysterical. If you like your movies straightforward and linear, then this is not for you, but it’s easy to love this absolute riot of a film. And yes, that person sitting on the bench in the cemetery is exactly who you think it is.

One of several Tsai films in which Lee portrays a version of Hsiao-kang, What Time Is It There? is screening April 21 at 4:40 as part of “Drifting Through Time: Focus on Lee Kang-sheng,” Metrograph’s tribute to Lee’s thirty-five-year career as an actor, screenwriter, and director, in conjunction with the US release of Constance Tsang’s Blue Sun Palace, in which Lee portrays an immigrant working in Flushing; the series also features such films as Tsai’s The Wayward Cloud, Vive l’amour, The Hole, and I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone and Lee’s Help Me Eros. Lee will be at Metrograph April 25–27 to introduce The Hole and for Q&As following screenings of Blue Sun Palace with Tsang and costar Ke-Xi Wu, Help Me Eros, and the triple pack of Tsai’s Boys (Xiaohai), My Stinking Kid, and Single Belief.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]