this week in film and television

DOC NYC: THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS

Three Identical Strangers tells the amazing story of adopted triplets who find one another only to learn horrible details of their separation

THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS (Tim Wardle, 2018)
Cinepolis Chelsea
260 West 23rd St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Thursday, November 8, 6:15
Friday, November 9, 10:15 am
Festival runs November 8-15
www.docnyc.net
www.threeidenticalstrangers.com

At the beginning of Tim Wardle’s Three Identical Strangers, screening November 8 and 9 at the ninth annual DOC NYC festival, Bobby Shafran says, “When I tell people my story, they don’t believe it. I guess I wouldn’t believe the story if someone else were telling it, but I’m telling it. And it’s true, every word of it.” He then discusses how, in 1980, through a series of coincidences, he discovered that he was an adopted triplet, and the three brothers, born on July 12, 1961, became the best of friends, going on a media blitz and taking New York City by storm. That in itself is a great story, but that’s only the first part of this gripping movie; what follows is a thriller-like investigation into the lives of Edward Galland, David Kellman, and Robert Shafran involving why they were separated at birth by the Louise Wise Services adoption agency. It’s an utterly captivating film, as every time you think the story can’t get more bizarre, it does. Wardle speaks with many members of the three boys’ adopted families, journalists, and several people who were involved in the nature/nurture experiment that separated them; it’s absolutely heart-wrenching watching them learn what happened to them back in 1961 that changed their lives forever and ultimately resulted in tragedy — and the full truth is still not known. Winner of a Special Jury Prize at Sundance among awards at many other festivals, Three Identical Strangers is screening in the Short List section of DOC NYC, with Wardle present at both shows.

DOC NYC: BEYOND THE BOLEX

Alyssa Bolsey’s Beyond the Bolex explores a family legacy and the history of early film

BEYOND THE BOLEX (Alyssa Bolsey, 2018)
Cinepolis Chelsea
260 West 23rd St. between Seventh & Eighth Aves.
Thursday, November 8, 9:15
Festival runs November 8-15
www.docnyc.net
www.jacquesbolseyproject.com

The ninth annual DOC NYC festival, a celebration of nonfiction film, is bigger than ever, this year consisting of more than three hundred shorts and features and with an all-star collection of celebrity-driven works from November 8 to 15. But often it’s the small documentaries that offer the most surprises. One such film, screening at Cinepolis Chelsea on opening night, is Alyssa Bolsey’s Beyond the Bolex. Bolsey made her first movie when she was twelve, but following the death of her paternal grandfather, she found out that filmmaking was truly in her blood: Her great-grandfather was Jacques Bolsey, the inventor of the Bolex and an influential experimental filmmaker. “I had no idea that there was a long-lost family legacy waiting to be uncovered, a treasure trove going all the way back to the early days of film,” she says. But while speaking with such directors and cinematographers as Wim Wenders, Bruce Brown, Dave Alex Riddett, Jonas Mekas, and Barbara Hammer, she also discovers details about her family history she never knew during a twelve-year investigation into Jacques’s life and career. The world premiere screening will be followed by a Q&A with Alyssa Bolsey and producer Camilo Lara Jr.

SCIENCE ON SCREEN — RHINOCEROS: THE DECLINE OF CIVILIZATION

Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder can only do so much to battle fascism and conformity in Rhinoceros

RHINOCEROS (Tom O’Horgan, 1974)
Museum of the Moving Image, Redstone Theater
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Sunday, November 4, $15, 6:30
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

Seven years after striking comedy gold in Mel Brooks’s The Producers, Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder teamed up again in the misguided, misbegotten Rhinoceros, Tom O’Horgan’s completely mishandled cinematic adaptation of Eugène Ionesco’s 1959 Theatre of the Absurd classic. Mostel reprises the role of bon vivant John (Jean), which earned him a Tony, while Wilder is his downstairs neighbor Stanley (Bérenger), a schlemiel of an accountant. Stanley is in love with his coworker Daisy (Karen Black), which coincidentally is the same name as the sheep Wilder’s character falls hard for in Woody Allen’s 1972 Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex *But Were Afraid to Ask. But this time the animal problem involves the rhinoceros, some species of which in the twenty-first century are endangered because they are illegally hunted for their horns and by big-gamers filling their trophy cases. The plot deals with individuality and fascism as humanity threatens to become extinct as the strong-skinned rhino starts taking over the streets, even though we never see them. Meta and metaphors abound in the wacky, way-too-over-the-top slapstick farce, which never gains traction; even the 1970s score is utterly absurd, and not in a good way. I’ve seen a terrific production of the play in French and a disappointing one in Yiddish, but the movie is in its own oddball category.

Rhinoceros is screening November 4 at 6:30 at the Museum of the Moving Image as part of the “Science on Screen” series, with political scientist Ester Fuchs, author of Mayors and Money: Fiscal Policy in New York and Chicago and director of WhosOnTheBallot.org, and Theresa Rebeck, writer of such current shows as Bernhardt/Hamlet and Downstairs — and who wrote her own adaptation of Rhinoceros in 1996 — attempting to examine the film within the context of the decline of civilization today, particularly under President Donald Trump, whose sons are trophy hunters themselves.

DISTANT CONSTELLATION

Selma tells the heartbreaking story of her family during the Armenian genocide in Distant Constellation

DISTANT CONSTELLATION (Shevaun Mizrahi, 2018)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Opens Friday, November 2
212-660-0312
metrograph.com
grasshopperfilm.com

Shevaun Mizrahi’s debut feature, Distant Constellation, is a lovely, intimate portrait of a group of residents at an old age home in Istanbul who just go about their business or share deeply personal stories while major construction outside tears down the past to build a future the senior citizens will not be a part of. Two men spend much of their day going up and down in the elevator, making fun of each other, talking about aliens, and not wanting to be bothered by anyone else. A man is delighted to bring in halvah. A photographer who now can barely see repeats words and phrases as he tries to fix his flash. A man sleeps in a coffinlike bed, coughing, gasping, and singing as the wind whistles through the window. A woman tells the heart-wrenching tale of what she and her family went through during the Armenian genocide of 1915. And another man talks about his unending passion for sex and eroticism, reading passages from Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. There’s a lot of napping and sitting, staring into nothingness and watching television. Snow falls lightly from the sky. A flock of birds fly near giant cranes.

Life goes on at Turkish retirement home, inside and outside, in Distant Constellation

A still photographer who studied filmmaking at NYU and apprenticed with Oscar-nominated cinematographer Ed Lachman (Far from Heaven, Carol), Mizrahi regularly travels to Turkey to visit her father. (Her mother is an American.) Back in 2009, she started spending time at a retirement home for the elderly in her father’s hometown and, using a basic DSLR camera, began filming the very old men and women. Encouraged by film-school friends Shelly Grizim and Deniz Buga and inspired by Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth, and Wallace Stevens’s “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” Mizrahi decided to make a full-length film. She focuses her camera, which almost never moves, directly on her subjects, many of whom speak in their bedrooms, the construction often visible outside. Mizrahi shoots Selma, the genocide survivor, in extreme close-up, every moment of her life seemingly right there on her face. The people are not identified in the film by their full names, there is no voiceover narration, no doctors or nurses are interviewed, and no ages or background information is supplied other than what they choose to tell Mizrahi.

At one point Mizrahi, who served as director, cinematographer, editor, and sound designer — Grizim and Buga ultimately became her producers and worked with her on the sound, with Grizim also contributing to the editing and visual effects — shows two old alarm clocks side-by-side, with slightly different times, a wry comment on time itself, something that the residents do not experience the same as the construction workers, who expect to be part of the future they are building. Mizrahi even humanizes them, not casting them as villains eliminating the past. It’s quite a group of elderly characters she’s assembled, members of minorities who speak in Turkish, English, Armenian, French, Greek, and Kurdish. “Light the first light of evening, as in a room / In which we rest and, for small reason, think / The world imagined is the ultimate good,” Stevens wrote in “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.” But as someone says in Distant Constellation, “So is life.” The genuinely poetic film opens November 2 at Metrograph, with Mizrahi appearing at Q&As at the 7:00 show Friday, moderated by Eric Hynes, and at the 7:45 show on Saturday.

LIFE AND NOTHING MORE

Robert (Robert Williams) attempts to charm Regina (Regina Williams) in Life and Nothing More

LIFE AND NOTHING MORE (Antonio Méndez Esparza, 2017)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Through Tuesday, November 6
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
www.cafilm.org/lanm

Antonio Méndez Esparza’s follow-up to his debut, Aquí y Allá, is a sensitive, beautifully paced film that lives up to its title: Life and Nothing More. Inspired by Italian neorealism, Esparza employs a cinema vérité style to tell the story of Regina (Regina Williams), an African American single mother struggling to get by in Florida. Regina has a delightful three-year-old daughter (Ry’Nesia Chambers) and a quiet, distant fourteen-year-old son, Andrew (Andrew Bleechington), who is starting to get in trouble with the law, hanging around with bad kids and carrying around a knife. Regina works menial minimum-wage jobs to try to keep the family afloat while the father of her children is in prison. Robert (Robert Williams), a newcomer to the town, starts trying to charm her, wanting to take her out, but Regina is suspicious of his intentions, as is Andrew. But when Robert shows the least bit of threatening anger as he and Andrew clash, Regina has some difficult decisions to make, which grow more complicated when other facts come to light.

Fourteen-year-old Andrew (Andrew Bleechington) has trouble connecting in Antonio Méndez Esparza’s Life and Nothing More

Cinematographer Barbu Balasoiu keeps his camera slow and steady as it lingers on scenes with very little or no dialogue, maintaining a tense mood that hovers over the film. As with Aquí y Allá, which was shot in Mexico, most of the actors are nonprofessionals in their first film, which heightens the reality. Regina Williams gives a strong, tenderhearted performance as the mother, a woman dedicated to making a better life for her children but continually runs into roadblocks beyond her control. Writer-director Esparza often focuses on her eyes as she watches events unfold, saying nothing but wanting to fight back more and more without risking the safety of her family. The film also smartly explores the incarceration gap between blacks and white without getting overtly political. Robert Williams (no relation) is engaging, with just the right hint of mystery and possible danger, while Bleechington reveals much with very few words, a boy who just can’t seem to say or do the right thing (when he speaks at all). Winner of awards at film festival around the world in addition to the Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award, Life and Nothing More is an honest, nuanced look at race and class in twenty-first-century America, an intelligent and heartbreaking depiction of what life is like for so many people today.

TONY OURSLER: TEAR OF THE CLOUD

Speaking figures are projected onto a tree along the Hudson River in Tony Oursler’s “Tear of the Cloud” (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Riverside Park South / Hudson River
Enter at West 68th Street and Riverside Blvd.
October 30-31, free, 7:00 pm – 10:00 pm
www.publicartfund.org
flickr slideshow

For many years I’ve marveled at Tony Oursler’s unique and fantastical installations, living narratives in which people’s faces and bodies are projected onto sculptural works, either life-size versions of their bodies, miniature tableaux, or more abstract objects. The New York City native, who grew up on the banks of the Hudson River in Nyack, has now expanded his repertoire with “Tear of the Cloud,” a large-scale multimedia work on and around the landmarked 69th Street Transfer Bridge (Gantry), formerly a dock for car floats for the New York Central Railroad. (Previously, Oursler’s “The Influence Machine” took over Madison Square Park in 2000, in which he created a kind of giant séance; both that and “Tear of the Cloud” are Public Art Fund projects.) From seven to ten o’clock every night but Monday through Halloween, Oursler beams images onto the front and sides of the dock, on the base of the elevated West Side Highway, on a weeping willow tree, and onto the surface of the water itself. The visuals are supplemented by audio tracks of music, stories, and dialogue about the history of the area, dating from Lenape times and the Oneida community to the tech-heavy present and future.

Tony Oursler’s “Tear of the Cloud” consists of a wide range of iconic and abstract sound and images (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Oursler incorporates a vast range of people, places, and things into the work, focusing on modes of communication, historical figures, and seminal eureka moments, including Samuel F. B. Morse painting his daughter for “Susan Walker Morse (The Muse),” hollow-face illusions, artificial intelligence bots, Haverstraw bricks used in city construction, IBM’s Deep Blue, the color guard, the Great West Point Chain, Thomas Edison’s Black Maria movie studio, the Headless Horseman, the Jacquard loom, molecular recorders, the telegraph, PCBs, Morse code, Indian Point, the Manhattan Project, Jimi Hendrix, Timothy Leary, LSD, Woodstock, Franz Mesmer, a viking-like Millerite, punch cards, actress and feminist Pearl White from The Perils of Pauline, the talking drum, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” the official seal of the City of New York, and Mary Rogers being fished out of the water after being murdered in Sibyl’s Cave in New Jersey, which inspired Poe’s “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.” Among the more than two dozen performers making appearances are costume and prop designer Enver Chakartash, assistant editor Jack Colton, Grandmaster Flash, Spencer Davis, Constance Dejong, Jim Fletcher, Holly Stanton, Jason Scott Henderson, animator Sakshi Jain, Kate Valk, and soundtrack composers MV Carbon, Corey Riddell, Idrissa Kone, and Oursler himself in addition to the Manhattan Project Chorus and the New Red Order collective.

One of the finest and most influential experimental artists of the last four decades, Oursler is not about to make it simple for viewers to figure out exactly what is happening. As you walk all around the area — make sure to go down the pier and to look and listen in all directions — you’ll take in abstract audio and visuals that might not form a complete narrative but are instead like the many tributaries that ultimately feed into the enormous Hudson River. Fortunately, the official website features a well-annotated glossary as well as a map identifying all of the figures and scenes. Oursler refers to the installation as a “visual palimpsest, depicting the layering of information associated with unforeseen legacies of the waterway [inspired by] the mnemonic effect of the river and the many intertwined tropes associated with the Hudson Valley region.” Oursler named the work after Lake Tear of the Clouds in Essex County, which is the highest source of the Hudson; the title of the work (the first word of which can be read as either teer or tayr) also evokes digital storage, acid rain, climate change, and even the “Keep America Beautiful” commercial in which an actor portraying a Native American sheds a lone tear after seeing how we shamelessly pollute the Earth. However, as Oursler makes clear in a long, projected, hard-to-read text, he is acknowledging what has been done to the environment but going far beyond merely apologizing. There are only two more nights to catch this fab installation; be sure to allow at least an hour in order to properly absorb its many facets.

A BREAD FACTORY — PART ONE: FOR THE SAKE OF GOLD

Dorothea (Tyne Daly) and Greta (Elisabeth Henry) fight to save their community arts center in A Bread Factory: For the Sake of Gold

A BREAD FACTORY — PART ONE: FOR THE SAKE OF GOLD (Patrick Wang, 2018)
Village East Cinema
181-189 Second Ave. at 12th St.
Opens Friday, October 26
212-529-6799
abreadfactory.com/the-films
www.villageeastcinema.com

All politics are local, and so it is with Patrick Wang’s A Bread Factory: For the Sake of Gold, the first of a two-part epic about a small town’s battle over arts funding. Forty years ago, Dorothea (Tyne Daly, often in pigtails) and Greta (Elisabeth Henry) moved to Checkford in Upstate New York and turned a shuttered bread factory into an arts venue for the local community. They are now being challenged by businessman Karl (Trevor St. John) and the avant-garde performance art duo of May (Janet Hsieh) and Ray (George Young), who have constructed their own modern arts building, the FEEL Institute, and want the financial allocation that otherwise would have gone to the Bread Factory. Joined by Elsa (Nana Visitor), journalist Jan (Glynnis O’Connor), Sir Walter (Brian Murray, in his final film), and others, they have to convince the sketchy board — including Joel (Joe Felece), the ornery Alec (Joe Paparone), Darren (Eugene Brell), Pat (Kit Flanagan), Mavis (Nan-Lynn Nelson), and Laura (Julia Rock) — that it is more important to the town that the Bread Factory remains open, providing art, theater, film, music, and more to children and adults. Meanwhile, the shy Max has started dating Julie (Erica Durham), Mavis’s daughter, who wants to be an actress; Dorothea and Pat have a deeply personal feud; the rather unusual projectionist, Simon (Keaton Nigel Cooke), gets to meet one of his cinematic heroes, Jordan (Janeane Garofalo), who teaches an odd class to a group of youngsters; teacher Jason (James Marsters) demands administrative accountability; Dorothea is staging a version of Euripides’s Hecuba; Hollywood star Trooper Jaymes (Chris Conroy) unexpectedly arrives in town; and Sandra (opera soprano Martina Arroyo), who seems to live in a seat in the Bread Factory theater, shows a surprising aptitude for singing (and serves as a kind of Greek chorus).

Cinematographer Frank Barrera and writer-director Patrick Wang discuss a scene in first of two-part epic, A Bread Factory

The film takes on numerous contemporary issues, such as art against commerce, tradition versus the future, corruption, governmental conflict of interest, illegal immigration, Chinese influence, and even child labor laws. Wang (In the Family, The Grief of Others), who was partially inspired to make the film after visiting an old theater in Hudson, New York, adds plenty of absurdist humor to the proceedings, preventing things from getting too didactic; Daly is particularly adept at walking that fine line. Cinematographer Frank Barrera tends to keep his camera steady, preferring long shots with slow movement, giving the audience time to digest the wide-ranging, twisting plot. Be sure to pay attention to Chip Taylor’s self-referential, tongue-in-cheek song over the closing credits, which explains, “But is it over yet? Is it really over yet? Looking back, we all could use a little more story.” And more there is; A Bread Factory, Part Two: Walk with Me a While continues the tale, combining for more than four hours of Checkford intrigue at Village East, in addition to several postscreening Q&As, concluding at the 9:30 show on October 28, with critic Godfrey Cheshire, producer Daryl Freimark, and actors Zachard Sayle and Jonathan Iglesias. A Bread Factory will then be joined November 2 by Wang’s 2015 drama, The Grief of Others, with Q&As on Friday and Saturday after the 6:45 screenings.