this week in film and television

(UN)SILENT FILM NIGHT: METROPOLIS IN CONCERT

Workers change shifts in the lower depths in Fritz Lang’s futuristic masterpiece, Metropolis

METROPOLIS (Fritz Lang, 1927)
New School Tishman Auditorium
63 Fifth Ave. at Fourteenth St.
Wednesday, April 10, free with advance RSVP, 7:30
www.newschool.edu

Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent epic, Metropolis, has been shown over the years in various versions and with different music, most famously Giorgio Moroder’s 1984 score. On April 10, the New School’s College of Performing Arts will present the world premiere of a new score by Mannes School of Music student Amir Sanjari, performed live to the film by the Mannes Orchestra, conducted by Robert Kahn. “Among the many things that are magical about masterpieces of the silent film era is the possibility of creating new musical sound worlds for extraordinary moving images. This is just what our student composer Amir Sanjari has done with Fritz Lang’s legendary Metropolis, where the brilliant young composer of 2024 joins forces with the 1927 thunderbolt of silent film history,” executive dean Richard Kessler said in a statement. The event is part of the (Un)Silent Film series, which has featured new scores for such works as Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush and The Immigrant and Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr., with such hosts as Matthew Broderick, Bill Irwin, and Rob Bartlett.

Set one hundred years in the future, Metropolis pits man vs. machine, the corporation against the worker, and sin vs. salvation in a technologically advanced society run by business mogul Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel). While Fredersen rakes in the big bucks on the surface, the workers are treated like slaves way down below, in a dark, dank hell where they perform their automaton-like jobs. When Fredersen’s son, Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), starts feeling sympathy for the workers and falls for Maria (Brigitte Helm), an activist who is trying to convince the men, women, and children of the lower depths that they deserve more out of life, Fredersen has mad inventor Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) create a man-machine version of Maria to steer his employees to a revolution that will lead them to self-destruct, although things don’t quite turn out as planned. Written by Lang and his wife, Thea Von Harbou, Metropolis is a visual marvel, featuring jaw-dropping special effects by Eugen Schüfftan (who was developing his Schüfftan process of using miniatures) and a stunning man-machine designed by sculptor Walter Schulze-Mittendorff.

Walter Schulze-Mittendorff’s man-machine stirs up plenty of trouble among the workers in 2026

The complex story incorporates biblical elements, from direct references to the Tower of Babel to other allusions, including fire and flood, while focusing on the relationship between father and prodigal son that evokes both God and Jesus and Abraham and Isaac. A parable that also relates to the battle between employers and unions, the film features a series of doppelgängers: There are two Marias, the real one, who is loving and genuine, and the cold and calculating man-machine; Freder and worker 11811, Georgy (Erwin Binswanger), who temporarily switch places; and Fredersen’s wife, Hel, who died while giving birth to Freder but has been revived into the initial man-machine by Rotwang, who was also in love with her. The massive achievement was shot by Karl Freund (Dracula, Key Largo) with Günther Rittau and Walter Ruttmann, who give it a dazzlingly dramatic look in every scene, accompanied by a soaring score by Gottfried Huppertz that incorporates snippets of Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle’s “La Marseillaise.” The film declares, “The mediator between head and hands must be the heart!” Lang explores all three in this remarkable film.

“Fritz Lang got the idea for Metropolis when he was in Manhattan in the 1920s promoting another movie of his. Knowing this, I took inspiration from the city itself,” Sanjari said in a statement. “The buildings, the art, and many other things in New York City inspired me to write the score. In addition, I was very inspired by minimalism and the repetition of musical ideas, so I tried to incorporate that.” Admission is free with advance RSVP.

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

FILMS OF PATRICIA ROZEMA: A RETROSPECTIVE

The career of Canadian auteur Patricia Rozema will be celebrated at Roxy retrospective

FILMS OF PATRICIA ROZEMA
Roxy Cinema
2 Sixth Ave. at Church St.
April 5-11
www.roxycinemanewyork.com

“You know, the smile that people have when they think they’re alone — that look people have when they think they’re alone or they’re not being watched — is entirely different from the way we are with others in the room,” award-winning Toronto New Wave director Patricia Rozema told David Schwartz in a November 1999 Museum of the Moving Image Pinewood Dialogue about Mansfield Park, her adaptation of the novel by Jane Austen. “I’m probably attracted to making movies because I’m a voyeur, because I wish for those moments. And since it’s illegal, for the most part, to capture them, you have to re-create them.”

Rozema will be at the Roxy Cinema for several Q&As during a weeklong retrospective consisting of five of her films, beginning April 5 at 7:15 with a 4K restoration of her second feature, White Room, which stars Maurice Godin, Margot Kidder, and Kate Nelligan in a dark fairy tale about murder and celebrity obsession; the screening will be followed by a Q&A with the Future of Film Is Female’s Caryn Coleman. On April 6 at 7:30 and April 11 at 7:30, Rozema will speak with Queer Forty editor-in-chief Merryn Johns after a screening of a 4K restoration of 1995’s When Night Is Falling, in which two university professors at a faith-based institution, Camille (Pascale Bussières) and Martin (Henry Czerny), are considering getting married until Camille is suddenly drawn to the mysterious acrobat Petra (Rachael Crawford).

On April 7 at 5:15, Rozema will discuss 2018’s Mouthpiece with writer director Charlie Kaufman; the film is based on a play by Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava, who star as two sides of the same woman, Cassandra, dealing with the death of their mother. And on April 8 at 7:00, Rozema will be on hand to talk with A. M. Homes about her debut, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing. In addition, a 35mm print of Mansfield Park will be shown April 6 at 5:15, and White Room will have an encore screening on April 10 at 9:00.

“I believe in tension and release, in that if you stay in the the same tone and mode and intensity for too long, it actually becomes monotonous. When you change up your pace or your humor level, then the release is welcome,” Rozema says in the DVD audio commentary of Mansfield Park. “I believe that’s my biggest job: tone control, and maintaining enough unity so that it all feels like one movie and all the scenes belong together, and yet diversity so that emotional and narrative interest is maintained.”

Polly Vandersma (Sheila McCarthy) shares her unique view of the world in I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing

I’VE HEARD THE MERMAIDS SINGING (Patricia Rozema, 1987)
Monday, April 8, 7:00
www.roxycinemanewyork.com
www.kinolorber.com

“Gosh. You know, sometimes I think my head is like a gas tank. You have to be really careful what you put into it because it might just affect the whole system,” Polly Vandersma (Sheila McCarthy) says in I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing. “I mean, isn’t life the strangest thing you’ve ever seen?”

Considered one of the best films to ever come out of Canada, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing is plenty strange itself. The 1987 comedy is a unique exploration of queer culture and belongs with such 1980s underground fare as Smithereens, Liquid Sky, and Repo Man as well as James McBride’s 1967 David Holzman’s Diary. In her second film, McCarthy stars as the birdlike Polly, a quirky, self-described “unsuccessful career woman” and “gal on the go,” a not-very-good girl Friday who is content being a temporary secretary, the antithesis of the ’80s archetype embodied by Tess McGill, the ambitious thirty-year-old portrayed by Melanie Griffith in Mike Nichols’s 1988 Working Girl.

The story is told in flashback as Polly makes a video about her simple existence, kind of like a precursor to the confessions in MTV’s The Real World but without the self-aggrandizement. Polly lives alone in Toronto, with no friends; now thirty-one, she lost both her parents ten years before. She’s not exactly smart or well rounded and not much of a conversationalist. When gallery curator Gabrielle (Paule Baillargeon) offers her a full-time position, Polly jumps at the chance, ready to immerse herself in the contemporary art world, which she knows nothing about, and Gabrielle’s personal life, which includes the sudden, unexpected return of her old girlfriend, Mary (Ann-Marie MacDonald).

Polly is an aspiring photographer who snaps pictures of people on the street hanging out, playing sports, and falling in love, all activities that seem to evade her. She develops the film in her bathroom, which she has converted into a makeshift darkroom. Meanwhile, she has endearing fantasies of climbing buildings, flying, and walking on water. Her photos and fantasies are in black-and-white, countering the pastel colors of her daily life. When she finds out that Gabrielle is a painter — her canvases literally glow, as if descended from heaven (while evoking the mysterious object in the trunk of the Chevy Malibu in Repo Man) — she becomes obsessed with her mentor’s works as both of them decide to pursue their artistic talents further.

Filmed in Toronto in one month for $275,000, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, winner of the Prix de la Jeunesse at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, underwent a 4K restoration in 2017 as part of Canada 150, a celebration of the country’s 150th anniversary of its confederation. The title was taken from a line in T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me.”

McCarthy, who also appeared in Rozema’s White Room, won the first of two Genie Awards for Best Actress, the Canadian equivalent of the Oscars, for Mermaids; she would nab the honor again six years later for Diane Kingswood’s The Lotus Eaters. She is mesmerizing as the endlessly eccentric, spikey-red-haired Polly, who is as peculiar and unpredictable as she is charming and endearing; it’s like she’s arrived from another planet, intent on learning what life can be about. Pay close attention to the scene in which Gabrielle and art critic Clive (Richard Monette) discuss a new painting by a gallery artist while Polly eavesdrops; they are actually talking about her potential transformation, even if she doesn’t realize it.

Rozema wrote, directed, edited, and coproduced the film, which features playful cinematography by Douglas Koch and a fab ’80s score by Mark Korven, alongside Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5.

Rozema will participate in a Q&A with author A. M. Homes following the screening. “I wanted to make a warm-spirited anti-authority film,” Rozema says in her director’s statement. “But most of all I wanted to make a film with Polly in it, one where she and I get to hear the mermaids singing.” We should consider ourselves fortunate to be able to do the same.

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

NOVEL ENCOUNTERS: THE FILMS OF LEE CHANG-DONG

NOVEL ENCOUNTERS
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
April 5-28
212-660-0312
metrograph.com/film

Since his debut as a writer and director with 1997’s Green Fish, South Korean auteur has Lee Chang-dong has made only five subsequent feature films, which might actually add to his growing international reputation. Born on July 4, 1954, Lee is also a novelist, playwright, and short story writer and former Minister of Culture and Tourism. Metrograph will be screening all six full-length works in the series “Novel Encounters: The Films of Lee Chang-dong,” running April 5-28, featuring the US theatrical premieres of new 4K restorations of Green Fish, Peppermint Candy, Poetry, and Oasis. The series also includes A Brand New Life and A Girl at My Door, which Lee produced, and the below three works. “It brings me great delight and thrill to hold my retrospective at the esteemed Metrograph, renowned as a cherished haven for cinephiles in New York,” Lee said in a statement. “The films curated for this retrospective each serve as vessels for my earnest contemplations on life, society, and humanity, each in their own way.”

Lee Chang-dong’s Burning was the first South Korean movie to make the Oscar shortlist for Best Foreign Language Film

BURNING (Lee Chang-dong, 2018)
Friday, April 5, 9:30
Sunday, April 7, 4:30
Wednesday, April 10, 8:45
metrograph.com/film

Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 Burning, his first film since 2010, met with breakout success, becoming the first South Korean film to be shortlisted for a Best Foreign Language Oscar. Based on the short story “Barn Burning” by Japanese author Haruki Murakami, Burning is a psychological thriller, cowritten by Oh Jung-mi, about a wannabe young writer and slacker, Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), who bumps into an old classmate, Shin Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), and starts up a new friendship with her, including taking care of her cat when she’s away. Lee is none too happy when she later shows up with Ben (Steven Yeun), who Jong-su thinks is wrong for her. Ben shares with Jong-su his penchant for burning down greenhouses, which only furthers Jong-su’s distrust of Ben, which does not please Hae-mi. At two and a half hours, Burning is long and slow moving, but it is also lushly photographed by Hong Kyung-pyo and deeply meditative, with a powerful ending that is worth waiting around for.

Lee Shin-ae (Jeon Do-yeon) reexamines her life in Secret Sunshine

SECRET SUNSHINE (MILYANG) (Lee Chang-dong, 2007)
Saturday, April 13, 12:00
Sunday, April 14, 2:20
metrograph.com/film

Lee Chang-dong’s fourth film — and his first since 2002’s Oh Ah Shisoo (Oasis) — is a harrowing examination of immeasurable grief. After losing her husband, Lee Shin-ae (Jeon Do-yeon) decides to move with her young son, Jun (Seon Jeong-yeob), to Milyang, her late husband’s hometown. Milyang, which means “secret sunshine,” is a typical South Korean small town, where everyone knows everybody. Restarting her life, Shin-ae gets help from Kim Jong-chan (Song Kang-ho), a local mechanic who takes an immediate liking to her. But Shin-ae is more concerned with settling down with her son and giving piano lessons. When a horrific tragedy strikes, she begins to unravel, refusing help from anyone until she turns to religion, but even that does not save her from her ever-darkening sadness. Cannes Best Actress winner Jeon gives a remarkable, devastating performance, holding nothing back as she fights for her sanity. Song, best known for his starring role in Bong Joon-ho’s The Host, is charming as Jong-chan, a friendly man who is a little too simple to understand the depth of what is happening to Shin-ae. Don’t let the nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time scare you away; Secret Sunshine is an extraordinary film that does not feel nearly that long.

Yun Jung-hee returns to the screen for the first time in sixteen years in moving Poetry

POETRY (SHI) (Lee Chang-dong, 2010)
Friday, April 26, 5:00 & 7:40
Saturday, April 27, 12:00 & 7:50
Sunday, April 28, 12:00 & 7:15
metrograph.com/film

Returning to the screen for the first time in sixteen years, legendary Korean actress Yun Jung-hee is mesmerizing in Lee Chang-dong’s beautiful, bittersweet, and poetic Poetry. Yun stars as Mija, a lovely but simple woman raising her teenage grandson, Wook (Lee David), and working as a maid for Mr. Kang (Kim Hi-ra), a Viagra-taking old man debilitated from a stroke. When she is told that Wook is involved in the tragic suicide of a classmate (Han Su-young), Mija essentially goes about her business as usual, not outwardly reacting while clearly deeply troubled inside. As the complications in her life grow, she turns to a community poetry class for solace, determined to finish a poem before the memory loss that is causing her to forget certain basic words overwhelms her. Winner of the Best Screenplay award at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, Poetry is a gorgeously understated work, a visual, emotional poem that never drifts from its slow, steady pace. Writer-director Lee (Peppermint Candy, Secret Sunshine) occasionally treads a little too close to clichéd melodrama, but he always gets back on track, sharing the moving story of an unforgettable character. Throughout the film he offers no easy answers, leaving lots of room for interpretation, like poems themselves.

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

ON THE ADAMANT

On the Adamant tells the story of a floating sanctuary for people with mental illness

ON THE ADAMANT (Nicolas Philibert, 2023)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, March 29
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
kinolorber.com

“Mentally sick people have no family,” François Gozlan says in Nicolas Philibert’s charming and heartwarming On the Adamant. Winner of the Golden Bear at the 2023 Berlinale, the documentary is set on board the Adamant, a beautiful floating sanctuary docked at the Quai de la Rapée on the Seine, where a community of men and women with mental illness voluntarily gather for meetings, workshops, and general camaraderie, forming their own kind of chosen family. Started in July 2010 by the Paris Central Psychiatric Group and affiliated with the Saint-Maurice hospital complex, the Adamant offers compassionate care while encouraging the patients to explore their social and artistic sides.

Over the course of seven months in 2021 during the Covid crisis, Philibert compiled one hundred hours of footage, filming the group going over their budget, welcoming new people, playing music, cooking, painting, and working behind a coffee counter. While there are various nurses, a psychiatrist or psychologist, occupational therapists, and hospital service agents present, they are not easy to identify; no one is wearing white lab coats or name cards, so it’s not always immediately clear who is the patient and who is the caregiver.

Director, cinematographer, and editor Philibert, with a crew of no more than four, alternates between being a fly on the wall at meetings and workshops and speaking with several of the patients, who are aware, for the most part, of their medical situations and share poignant details of their personal lives. One woman discusses how she misses her teenage son, who went into foster care when he was five because, as she explains, “My mind was a mess.” A man plays a lovely tune on the piano and sings, “Nobody’s perfect.” Another man who plays the electric guitar says, “Everyone has thought of a magic wand. ‘No more this, no more that, I’ll be different.’” The dapper Frédéric Prieur, who is obsessed with the tragic deaths of Jim Morrison, James Dean, and Gérard Philipe, points out that he writes stories and songs because “I want to understand at all costs why such things happened to us.”

One man talks about his violent tendencies and ravings, admitting that without his pills he has “acute fits and hallucinations”; when he says, “Lucky I’m not armed,” it’s hard not to be reminded of the controversy in the United States about gun control. Another declares, “The people here aren’t terrorists. . . . They’re very fragile people. I’m very fragile myself. People have image problems here. That’s because others can look at us . . . In the Metro, we have slightly broken faces, maybe. I don’t know. People always give us curious looks.” But there’s nothing political in Philibert’s film other than showing that there are benevolent, humane options for treating the mentally ill, which he lets us see for ourselves; he doesn’t have any experts lecturing about what is happening on board and outside the Adamant.

Meanwhile, others share their hopes and dreams, which are not always feasible, lost in fantasies that are disconnected to reality — and perhaps more relevant to each of us than we might be willing to admit.

“You have some real stars here. Better than movie actors,” one man proudly boasts, and he’s right. As On the Adamant continues, the patients develop as unique characters in their own way, not stereotypes or caricatures put on display.

The Adamant is a refuge for people with mental illness to explore their creative sides

The film opens with Gozlan performing a screeching version of Téléphone’s “Human Bomb,” shouting out with defiance, “I want to talk to you about me, about you / Inside I see images, colors / that aren’t mine / that sometimes scare me, / sensations that can drive us mad / Our senses are the strings of pathetic marionettes / Our senses are the path to our mind / The human bomb, you have it in your hand / The detonator’s there just next to your heart / The human bomb is you, it belongs to you / If you let anyone take over your destiny / it’s the end.”

The Adamant offers the patients on board the chance to control at least part of their destiny. But the film, the first of a trilogy Philibert is making in conjunction with the Paris Central Psychiatric Group, closes with the Adamant enveloped in fog, as the future of people with mental illness is far from clear.

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

STANDARD DEVIATIONS: THIS IS NOT A FILM

Even house arrest and potential imprisonment cannot stop Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi from telling cinematic stories

THIS IS NOT A FILM (IN FILM NIST) (Jafar Panahi & Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, 2011)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Monday, March 25, 7:00
Series runs March 22-28
718-636-4100
canopycanopycanopy.com
www.bam.org

“You call this a film?” Jafar Panahi asks rhetorically about halfway through the revealing 2011 documentary This Is Not a Film, screening March 25 at 7:00 at BAM as part of “Triple Canopy Presents: Standard Deviations,” a weeklong festival, curated by Yasmina Price, consisting of works that challenge cinematic norms in visual and narrative storytelling. “Standard Deviations” opens March 22 with Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess and concludes March 28 with Ephraim Asili’s “Multisensory Alchemies: Daïchi Saïto + Konjur Collective,” featuring films accompanied by live music, followed by a Q&A. Other highlights are Stephanie Rothman’s The Student Nurses, William Greaves’s Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, and Raúl Ruiz and Valeria Sarmiento’s The Wandering Soap Opera.

After several arrests beginning in July 2009 for supporting the opposition party, highly influential and respected Iranian filmmaker Panahi (Crimson Gold, Offside) was convicted in December 2010 for “assembly and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic.” Although facing a six-year prison sentence and twenty-year ban on making or writing any kind of movie, Panahi is a born storyteller, so he can’t stop himself, no matter the risks. Under house arrest, Panahi has his friend, fellow director Mojtaba Mirtahmasb (Lady of the Roses), film him with a handheld DV camera over ten days as Panahi plans out his next movie, speaks with his lawyer, lets his pet iguana climb over him, and is asked to watch a neighbor’s dog, taking viewers “behind the scenes of Iranian filmmakers not making films.” Panahi even pulls out his iPhone to take additional video, photographing New Year’s fireworks that sound suspiciously like a military attack. Panahi is calm throughout, never panicking (although he clearly does not want to take care of the barking dog) and not complaining about his situation, which becomes especially poignant as he watches news reports on the earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan.

“But you can’t make a film now anyhow, can you?” Mirtahmasb — who will later be arrested and imprisoned as well — asks at one point. “So what I can’t make a film?” Panahi responds. “That means I ask you to take a film of me? Do you think it will turn into some major work of art?” This Is Not a Film, which was smuggled out of Iran in a USB drive hidden in a birthday cake so it could be shown at Cannes, is indeed a major work of art, an important document of government repression of free speech as well as a fascinating examination of one man’s intense dedication to his art and the creative process. Shortlisted for the Best Documentary Academy Award, This Is Not a Film is a mesmerizing experience from a genius who has since gifted the world with Closed Curtain, Taxi, Three Faces, and No Bears, defying the government while constantly looking over his shoulder.

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

FOREVER YOUNG: AMERICAN HONEY

Sasha Lane makes a compelling debut in Andrea Arnold’s extraordinary American Honey

AMERICAN HONEY (Andrea Arnold, 2016)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Friday, March 15, 5:30
Festival runs March 1-24
212-660-0312
metrograph.com
www.americanhoney-movie.com

Metrograph continues its “Forever Young” series with Andrea Arnold’s fourth feature film, an exhilarating and daring whirlwind epic about marginalized college-age youth trying to make a go of it in contemporary America. In American Honey, her third Grand Jury Prize winner at Cannes (following Fish Tank and Red Road), Arnold goes on the road with the 071 mag crew, a group of itinerant high school dropouts and runaways who cross middle America in a van, selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. As in all of her films, Arnold casts many nonprofessional actors, including Sasha Lane, who she discovered on a Florida beach during spring break. Lane makes a dazzling debut as Star, a young woman in an extremely dysfunctional family who is captivated by Jake (Shia LaBeouf) and his friends’ antics in a Walmart. Lured in by Jake’s seductive charm, she runs away from home and joins the ragtag bunch of more than a dozen lost souls who have formed a kind of unique family of their own. Led by the tough Krystal (Riley Keough) and the bold Jake, the mag crew spends its days trying to sell subscriptions for cash, making their way through various communities in Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and North Dakota. At night they stay at motels and party all night long, drinking, dancing, singing, and goofing around.

The tight-knit group consists of Shaunte (Shawna Rae Moseley, the real-life owner of the mag crew’s pit bull), Pagan (Arielle Holmes, who detailed her own troubles in Heaven Knows What), Katness (former exotic dancer Crystal B. Ice), QT (Verronikah Ezell, who is raising a daughter with her wife), Billy (singer-songwriter Chad McKenzie Cox), Austin (former high school football player Garry Howell), Sean (construction worker Kenneth Kory Tucker, who is dating Moseley), JJ (Raymond Coalson), Kalium (skateboarder Isaiah Stone), Runt (Dakota Powers), Corey (McCaul Lombardi), and Chris (Christopher David Wright), most of whom revel in their freedom, unworried about parents, the government, or other authority figures. Meanwhile, Krystal is a kind of modern-day Fagin, threatening to kick out poor performers, forcing those with the lowest sales figures into brutal fistfights with each other. The street-smart but sensitive Star does what she needs to survive, including getting into cars and trucks with men who have something more than magazines on their mind, although she is disturbed by Jake’s lies and how he and others steal from customers. The film is a breathtaking coming-of-age tale not just for Star but for this entire generation of kids who have been shut out of mainstream society, for whatever reason, but are not giving up on their dreams.

Jake (Shia LaBeouf) and Star (Sasha Lane) encounter some major trouble in exhilarating road-trip movie

Inspired by a 2007 New York Times article by Ian Urbina that detailed the very real and harsh story of mag crews, Arnold traveled across parts of America by herself in researching the film, then had members of the cast actually try to sell magazine subscriptions in Kansas City. The film was shot in fifty-six days as the cast and a limited crew traveled in vans and stayed in motels. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who has photographed all four of Arnold’s feature films (as well as Philomena and several documentaries), does a superb job of capturing the open road, the Bible Belt neighborhoods, and the wild abandon and exciting energy exhibited by the mag crew, who were allowed to develop their characters and improvise. The soundtrack is critical to the film, and it boasts a wide variety of music, with songs by E-40, the Raveonettes, Ciara featuring Ludacris, Bruce Springsteen, Jeremih, Mazzy Star, Carnage, Razzy Bailey, Kevin Gates, Quigley, MadeinTYO, Lady Antebellum, and others. The actors, most of whom are making their first cinematic appearances, form a tight-knit family that is thrilling to watch develop. LaBeouf (Transformers, Nymphomaniac) gives one of his best performances as the hard-to-figure-out Jake, while Lane, who moved to Los Angeles to continue acting, is mesmerizing as Star, whose problems are emblematic of so much of what is wrong in today’s society. The film is very much about the hopes and dreams of this lost generation — and how the American dream has failed them. A 162-minute film about disaffected youth selling magazine subscriptions in the twenty-first century might not sound like a slam dunk, but Arnold, in her first film made in the States, has created an unforgettable vision of the country today. “We explore, like, America; we party. Come with us,” Jake tells Sasha early on. We’re glad we went along for the ride too; so will you.

American Honey opened on September 30, 2016, at the Landmark Sunshine and Loews Lincoln Square, the same day that the New York Film Festival began. Curiously, Arnold was the inaugural 2013 filmmaker in residence at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, the host of the festival, but American Honey was not selected for the fifty-fourth annual event. Among the upcoming “Forever Young” screenings are Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day, Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, and John Waters’s Cry-Baby.

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

FIRST LOOK 2024: SOLARIS MON AMOUR / HANDFUL OF DIRT

Kuba Mikurda’s Solaris mon amour explores inner and outer space using found footage

SOLARIS MON AMOUR (Kuba Mikurda, 2023) / HANDFUL OF DIRT (GARSTKA ZIEMI) (Izabela Zubrycka, 2023)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Friday, March 15, $15, 6:30
Series runs March 13-17, individual screenings $15, Weekend Pass $60, All-Festival Pass $120
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

Despite its tantalizing title, Kuba Mikurda’s Solaris Mon Amour is not an experimental film lover’s fantasy mashup of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour. Instead, it’s a fascinating journey into grief and trauma, dreams and memory, using found scientific footage to create a compelling and haunting cinematic experience.

Mikurda goes back to Stanisław Lem’s novel Solaris, which the Polish writer and philosopher began writing in 1959, the year that Hiroshima mon amour was released. The latter is about an actress and an architect who have a torrid affair in one of the two cities that the United States dropped the atomic bomb on in 1945; the former imagines a planet where an astronaut encounters what appears to be his dead wife, among other strange things.

Mikurda and editor Laura Pawela piece together their forty-seven-minute black-and-white story out of excerpts from more than seventy films in the WFO archives at the Educational Film Studio in Lodz made between 1952 and 1982, including Earth Our Planet, Life of the Stars, Radiographic Study of Metals, The World of Mold, Injections, Jellyfish, Plasma Torch, ABC of Cosmonautics, and She Put Down Foots Filled the Ground, accompanied by Marcin Lenarczyk’s sci-fi soundtrack. The images range from the sun, moon, and stars to technical equipment, brain tissue, blood molecules, microorganisms, astronaut training, flames, random numbers, and extreme close-ups of unidentified people, along with audio clips from Jozef Grotowski’s 1962 and 1970 radio adaptations of Solaris.

“It was the first and only totally incomprehensible case in my life,” Kris Kelvin says. “I’m flying to Solaris because I think this is about ourselves, about the limits of human cognition.”

The director was inspired by Agnieszka Gajewska’s books Holocaust and the Stars: The Past in the Prose of Stanisław Lem and Stanislaw Lem: Exiled from the High Castle, in addition to such films as Chris Marker’s La Jetée, Guy Maddin’s The Green Fog, and György Palfi’s Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen; it also made me think of Bill Morrison’s Decasia, with its decaying film stock.

Solaris Mon Amour opens with a shot of a camera lens facing slightly off center, tracking a man checking the grassy ground in a field and digging into the earth. “How exhausting. Need to wake up,” a voiceover says. Mikurda then cuts to a view of the universe and, later, microscopic images, equating the camera and the microscope, two instruments humans employ to learn more about the world and our place in the universe. Mikurda (Love Express: The Disappearance of Walerian Borowczyk, Escape to the Silver Globe) crafts it all into a hypnotic audiovisual mystery that will keep echoing in your mind long after it’s over.

Izabela Zubrycka’s Handful of Dirt follows a rural Polish funeral singer and her gravedigger son

Solaris Mon Amour is being shown March 15 at 6:30 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s thirteenth annual First Look festival, running March 13–17, comprising more than two dozen events, from North American film premieres to screenplay readings, workshops, and an art reception. Mikurda’s film will be preceded by Izabela Zubrycka’s student documentary Handful of Dirt (Garstka Ziemi), which also explores such themes as grief and loss. Zubrycka focuses on Halina Waszkiewicz, one of the last funeral singers in Podlasie, Poland, and her son, gravedigger Andrzej Wójcik. The thirteen-minute short echoes Solaris Mon Amour in its own way, with shots of the sun, sky, and moon, Wójcik digging into the earth, moments of silence, extreme close-ups, and talk of time, dreams, sleep, and death.

Writer-director Zubrycka, cinematographer Stefan Żółtowski, editor Anna Adamowicz, and sound recordist Maciej Tobera follow Andrzej as he prepares the graves and Halina joins a group of singers in black who will help the deceased cross over through song. “I wasn’t afraid and I’m not afraid of the dead,” Halina says. “What is death?”

Mikurda and Zubrycka will be at the screening at MoMI’s Redstone Theater to discuss their work. First Look kicks off March 13 with Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez’s Sujo and Charlie Shackleton’s short Lateral and continues with such films as Mariam Chachia and Nik Voigt’s Magic Mountain, Robert Kolodny’s The Featherweight, and Lois Patiño’s Samsara.

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