this week in film and television

ONE-TIMERS: WANDA

Barbara Loden wrote, directed, produced, and stars in Wanda

WANDA (Barbara Loden, 1970)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Friday, September 13, 8:20 (with introduction)
Sunday, September 15, 2:50
Thursday, September 19, 3:00
212-660-0312
metrograph.com

“If you don’t want anything, you won’t have anything, and if you don’t have anything, then you’re as good as dead,” Mr. Dennis (Michael Higgins) tells Wanda Goronski (Barbara Loden) in Wanda, which is screening September 13, 15, and 19 in the continuing Metrograph series “One-Timers.” The first theatrical feature written, directed, produced by, and starring an American woman, Wanda is a raw, naturalistic road-trip movie about an emotionally vacant woman who walks through life in a kind of stupor, wandering into situations to avoid being alone yet still trapped in an unrelenting alienation. Loden, who won a 1964 Tony for her portrayal of Maggie in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall — the play was directed on Broadway by Elia Kazan, whom she would marry four years later and remain with through her tragic death in 1980 — doesn’t try to turn Wanda into a feminist antihero, but she does take all the power away from her, making her completely dependent on other people, primarily men, an excellent counterpoint to Loden herself, who has all the power. Staying on her sister’s (Dorothy Shupenes) couch in the middle of Pennsylvania coal country, Wanda is almost zombielike as she slowly heads to court in curlers and a housecoat and lets the judge award custody of her two children to her soon-to-be-ex-husband (Jerome Thier). “I’m just no good,” she mumbles. Broke and apparently with no faith or hope in her future, she proceeds to get involved with some sketchy losers, including Mr. Dennis, who takes her on a minor crime spree that is a far cry from Bonnie and Clyde. All along the way, she rarely has anything of any interest to say to anyone; the only time she speaks clearly and definitively is when she explains that she likes onions on her hamburgers.

Mr. Dennis (Michael Higgins) takes Wanda Goronski (Barbara Loden) for quite a ride in Wanda

Shot in a cinéma vérité style by documentary cinematographer Nicholas T. Proferes, Wanda — named Best Foreign Film at the Venice International Film Festival — is a riveting and infuriating exploration of the death of the American dream as the 1960s come to an end and the country reexamines itself, not necessarily liking what it sees. Apathy competes with melancholy as Wanda is unable and unwilling to take control of her life, dressed in the same white outfit and carrying the same white pocketbook throughout nearly the entire film, but she is more disconsolate than angelic. Much of the film is improvised and most of the characters are portrayed by nonprofessional actors or people who just happened to be in the area, like the scene in which Mr. Dennis and Wanda encounter a family flying a remote-control model airplane. (Higgins would go on to make more than fifty films, including The Conversation, The Stepford Wives, and The Seduction of Joe Tynan.) Coming on the cusp of the women’s liberation movement, Wanda is about a pouty sad-sack who barely ever changes emotion, always wearing the same blank stare. It’s not that she’s promiscuous, adventurous, or even unpredictable; she just is. You desperately want her to take action, to care about something or someone, but it’s just not going to happen. It’s almost as if Loden is setting the groundwork for such future films as Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver, which feature such strong, decisive female characters as Alice (Ellen Burstyn) in the former and Iris (Jodie Foster) in the latter, who at least attempt to take matters into their own hands; elements of Wanda can also be found in Aki Kaurismäki’s Match Factory Girl and Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Wanda would end up being Loden’s only film as writer and director; she died in 1980 of cancer at the age of forty-eight. The September 13 screening will be introduced by Caryn Coleman, founder of the Future of Film Is Female.

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

JOHN FORD’S THE SEARCHERS: NEW 4K RESTORATION

John Wayne looks better than ever in new 4K restoration of The Searchers

THE SEARCHERS (John Ford, 1956)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
September 13-19
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

That’ll be the day when someone tries to claim there’s a better Western than John Ford’s ethnocentric look at the dying of the Old West and the birth of the modern era — and not it looks better than ever, in a 4K restoration opening at Film Forum September 13. Essentially about a gunfighter’s attempt to find and kill his young niece, who has been kidnapped and, ostensibly, ruined by Indians, The Searchers — based on the 1954 novel by Alan Le May — is laden with iconic imagery, inside messages, and not-so-subtle metaphors. Hence, it is no accident that John Wayne’s son, Patrick, plays an ambitious yet inept officer named Greenhill. The elder Wayne stars as Ethan Edwards, a tough-as-nails Confederate veteran seeking revenge for the murder of his brother’s family; he’s also out to save Debbie (Natalie Wood) from the Comanches, led by a chief known as Scar (Henry Brandon), by ending her life, because in his world view, it’s better to be dead than red.

In iconic Western, Jeffrey Hunter and Ethan Edwards search for Natalie Wood, with very different motives

Joining him on his trek is Debbie’s adopted brother, Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter), who wants to save her from Edwards. The magnificent film balances its serious center with a large dose of humor, particularly in the relationships between Ethan and Martin and Ethan with his Indian companion, Look (Beulah Archuletta). And keep your eye on that blanket in front of the house. Born in Maine in 1894, Ford made some of the most dazzling Westerns and literary adaptations ever put on celluloid; he passed away in 1973 at the age of seventy-nine, having won four Best Director Oscars among his nearly 140 pictures.

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

HOLDING BACK THE TIDE

Holding Back the Tide explores New York City’s oyster history through a queer lens

HOLDING BACK THE TIDE (Emily Packer, 2023)
DCTV Firehouse Cinema
87 Lafayette St.
September 6-12
212-966-4510
www.dctvny.org
www.holdingbackthetidefilm.com

In the hybrid documentary Holding Back the Tide, director and cowriter Emily Packer delves into the long history of New York City and oysters, visiting such spots as the Gowanus Canal, Grand Central Terminal, Governors Island, the Battery Park SeaGlass Carousel, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, the Staten Island Ferry, the Union Square Greenmarket, Jamaica Bay, and Violet Cove to trace their relation to the delicious mollusks. At each stop, Packer shares details about how oysters are raised, served, and preserved, topics that have taken on new importance during the major expansions of the waterfront that have thrived since the Bloomberg administration.

Packer also highlights oysters’ ability to switch gender — the mollusks are born male, and most become female within a year or two — to honor the LGBTQIA+ community, interspersing numerous scripted scenes into the film, which is “dedicated to the queer future.”

“All things living transform. We build, break, morph, become, and become ourselves again. The tides rise and fall, a rock turns to sand, an island is named, renamed, and made a city,” Aphrodite (Robin LaVerne Wilson aka Dragonfly) says early on, walking barefoot along the rocks. “No river is endless. All oceans meet the shore. And in the end, in the best case, we return to the beginning.”

Exploring harbor restoration, coastal protection, commercialization, and more, Packer meets with a wide-ranging group of environmentalists and entrepreneurs who are never identified, including Mothershuckers founder Ben “Moody” Harney, former WNBA star and current oyster farmer Sue Wicks, commercial fishermen Wade Karlin and Phil Karlin of PE & DD Seafood, Cornell Cooperative Extension shellfish hatchery manager Joshua Perry, CCE SPAT director Kim Tetrault, resilience planner Pippa Brashear, Gowanus Dredgers founder Owen Foote, and Tanasia Swift, Agata Poniatowski, and John Ribaudo of Billion Oyster Project. The nonfiction scenes are fun and informative, filmed on location as the people go about their daily business.

The fiction scenes, featuring actors Aasia Taylor-Patterson, TL Thompson, Hannah Rego, Thomas Annunziata, Meghan Dolbey, Katharine Antonia Nedder, Avery Nusbaum, Hilary Asare, and Marlena Ospina, have a New Age-y atmosphere, like mini-fantasies with poetry, lilting music, and underwater choreography, making it often feel like you’re watching two different films. A nonbinary couple slurp oysters at an otherwise empty Grand Central Oyster Bar, then go to the whisper gallery, hearing the sound of the ocean. A server shucks oysters in front of Delmonico’s in the Financial District. A pair of performers pose like Wisdom and Felicity, two of the figures in the Bailey Fountain at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn.

“Holding Back the Tide was made with intersectional queer values, queer practices, and LGBTQIA+ collaborators. As a nonbinary queer filmmaker working with a subject that regularly changes its sex as part of its reproductive process, it was important for me to create a vision of the oysters’ cultural economy that celebrated the environmental heroism of the oyster through a queer perspective,” Packer explains in their director’s statement. “Not only are most of the characters and actors queer people, but they also come to see that their gender evolution and self-actualization are reflected in nature. . . . Our creative choices are deeply rooted in our research and incorporate our subjects’ Black Indigenous immigrant and working class histories. We subvert the oyster’s ‘classic’ connotations of wealth and heterosexual aphrodisia reframing old tropes through an intersectional and anti-capitalist lens.”

Holding Back the Tide is running September 6-12 at DCTV Firehouse Cinema, with Q&As September 6 at 7:00 with Packer and Pete Malinowski of Billion Oyster Project, moderated by DCTV’s Dara Messinger; September 7 at 6:30 with comedian Esther Fallick and friends; September 8 at 5:00 with Packer and journalist Bedatri Choudhury; September 10 at 7:00 with Packer and filmmaker Lynne Sachs; and September 11 at 7:00 with Harney, aka the Real Mothershucker.

PEMA TSEDEN

An old man (Lochey) would rather sell himself than his canine companion in Pema Tseden’s Old Dog

OLD DOG (LAO GOU/KHYI RGAN) (Pema Tseden, 2011)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, September 7, 5:00
Series runs September 6-15
718-777-6888
movingimage.org

In June 2016, Tibetan filmmaker Pema Tseden, who lived and worked in Beijing, was arrested by Chinese authorities at Xining airport in western China for “disrupting social order” supposedly over a luggage dispute, then was admitted to a local hospital with various injuries and illnesses. He was shortly freed following international outcry, and he went right back to making films about Tibet. Tseden died in May 2023 at the age of fifty-eight, and the Museum of the Moving Image will be paying tribute to him with a ten-day, ten-film retrospective running September 6-15. The series kicks off with a double feature of The Silent Manistone and The Grassland and will be followed by such works as The Silent Holy Stones, The Search, Balloon, and Snow Leopard.

Screening September 7 at 5:00 is Tseden’s 2011 drama, Old Dog, a beautifully told, slowly paced meditation on Buddhism’s four Noble Truths — “Life means suffering”; The origin of suffering is attachment”; “The cessation of suffering is attainable”; and “There is a path to the cessation of suffering” — that ends with a shocking, manipulative finale that nearly destroys everything that came before it. In order to get a little money and to save the family’s sheep-herding dog from being stolen, Gonpo (Drolma Kyab) sells their Tibetan nomad mastiff to Lao Wang (Yanbum Gyal), a dealer who resells the prized breed to stores in China, where they’re used for protection. When Gonpa’s father (Lochey) finds out what his son has done, he goes back to Lao Wang and demands the return of the dog he’s taken care of for thirteen years. “I’d sell myself before the dog,” he tells his son.

And so begins a gentle tale of parents and children, set in a modern-day Tibet that is ruled by China’s heavy hand. Gonpa’s father doesn’t understand why his son, a lazy man who rides around on a motorized bike and never seems to do much of anything, doesn’t yet have any children of his own, so he pays for Gonpa and his wife, Rikso (Tamdrin Tso), to go to the doctor to see what’s wrong. Meanwhile, the old man keeps a close watch on his dog, wary that Lao Wang will to try to steal it again. Writer-director Tseden (Jinpa, Tharlo, The Sacred Arrow) explores such themes as materialism, family, and attachment in a lovely little film that sadly is nearly ruined by its extreme final scene.

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

RABBIT ON THE MOON: FOLK TALES, TALL TALES, AND LOCAL MYTHS

RABBIT ON THE MOON
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
September 6-29
212-660-0312
metrograph.com

The Metrograph series “Rabbit on the Moon: Folk Tales, Tall Tales, and Local Myths” consists of a dozen international films inspired by folklore from around the world. The works explore traditional stories from Sweden, Japan, Thailand, Georgia, Ireland, Germany, Italy, and South Korea, by some of the most important auteurs of the last seventy-five years.

Among the films are Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Decameron, Federico Fellini’s Fellini Satyricon, Sergei Parajanov and Dodo Abashidze’s The Legend of Suram Fortress, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Mysterious Object at Noon, Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre, Tomm Moore’s Song of the Sea, Na Hong-jin’s The Wailing, and Lois Patiño’s Red Moon Tide. Below is a look at several favorites.

Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) sits down with Death (Bengt Ekerot) for a friendly game of chess in Bergman classic

THE SEVENTH SEAL (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
Friday, September 6, 2:50
Sunday, September 8, 5:30
metrograph.com

It’s almost impossible to watch Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal without being aware of the meta surrounding the film, which has influenced so many other works and been paid homage to and playfully mocked. Over the years, it has gained a reputation as a deep, philosophical paean to death. However, amid all the talk about emptiness, doomsday, the Black Plague, and the devil, The Seventh Seal is a very funny movie. In fourteenth-century Sweden, knight Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) is returning home from the Crusades with his trusty squire, Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand). Block soon meets Death (Bengt Ekerot) and, to prolong his life, challenges him to a game of chess. While the on-again, off-again battle of wits continues, Death seeks alternate victims while Block meets a young family and a small troupe of actors putting on a show. Rape, infidelity, murder, and other forms of evil rise to the surface as Block proclaims “To believe is to suffer,” questioning God and faith, and Jöns opines that “love is the blackest plague of all.” Based on Bergman’s own play inspired by a painting of Death playing chess by Albertus Pictor (played in the film by Gunnar Olsson), The Seventh Seal, winner of a Special Jury Prize at Cannes, is one of the most entertaining films ever made. (Bergman fans will get an extra treat out of the knight being offered some wild strawberries at one point.)

Genjurō (Masayuki Mori) makes his pottery as son Genichi (Ikio Sawamura) and wife Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka) look on in Ugetsu

UGETSU (UGETSU MONOGATARI) (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)
Friday, September 13, 2:00
Sunday, September 15, 9:30
metrograph.com

The Metrograph series includes one of the most important and influential — and greatest — works to ever come from Japan. Winner of the Silver Lion for Best Director at the 1953 Venice Film Festival, Kenji Mizoguchi’s seventy-eighth film, Ugetsu, is a dazzling masterpiece steeped in Japanese storytelling tradition, especially ghost lore. Based on two tales by Ueda Akinari and Guy de Maupassant’s “How He Got the Legion of Honor,” Ugetsu unfolds like a scroll painting beginning with the credits, which run over artworks of nature scenes while Fumio Hayasaka’s urgent score starts setting the mood, and continues into the first three shots, pans of the vast countryside leading to Genjurō (Masayuki Mori) loading his cart to sell his pottery in nearby Nagahama, helped by his wife, Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka), clutching their small child, Genichi (Ikio Sawamura). Miyagi’s assistant, Tōbei (Sakae Ozawa), insists on coming along, despite the protestations of his nagging wife, Ohama (Mitsuko Mito), as he is determined to become a samurai even though he is more of a hapless fool. “I need to sell all this before the fighting starts,” Genjurō tells Miyagi, referring to a civil war that is making its way through the land. Tōbei adds, “I swear by the god of war: I’m tired of being poor.” After unexpected success with his wares, Genjurō furiously makes more pottery to sell at another market even as the soldiers are approaching and the rest of the villagers run for their lives. At the second market, an elegant woman, Lady Wakasa (Machiko Kyō), and her nurse, Ukon (Kikue Mōri), ask him to bring a large amount of his merchandise to their mansion. Once he gets there, Lady Wakasa seduces him, and soon Genjurō, Miyagi, Genichi, Tōbei, and Ohama are facing very different fates.

Lady Wakasa (Machiko Kyō) admires Genjurō (Masayuki Mori) in Kenji Mizoguchi postwar masterpiece

Written by longtime Mizoguchi collaborator Yoshitaka Yoda and Matsutaro Kawaguchi, Ugetsu might be set in the sixteenth century, but it is also very much about the aftereffects of World War II. “The war drove us mad with ambition,” Tōbei says at one point. Photographed in lush, shadowy black-and-white by Kazuo Miyagawa (Rashomon, Floating Weeds, Yojimbo), the film features several gorgeous set pieces, including one that takes place on a foggy lake and another in a hot spring, heightening the ominous atmosphere that pervades throughout. Ugetsu ends much like it began, emphasizing that it is but one postwar allegory among many. Kyō (Gate of Hell, The Face of Another) is magical as the temptress Lady Wakasa, while Mori (The Bad Sleep Well, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs) excels as the everyman who follows his dreams no matter the cost; the two previously played husband and wife in Rashomon. Mizoguchi, who made such other unforgettable classics as The 47 Ronin, The Life of Oharu, Sansho the Bailiff, and Street of Shame, passed away in 1956 at the age of fifty-eight, having left behind a stunning legacy, of which Ugetsu might be the best, and now looking better than ever following a recent 4K restoration.

Tōru Takemitsu “wanted to create an atmosphere of terror” in Masaki Kobayashi’s quartet of ghost stories

KWAIDAN (Masaki Kobayashi, 1964)
Saturday, September 21, 9:30
metrograph.com

Masaki Kobayashi paints four marvelous ghost stories in this eerie collection that won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes. In “The Black Hair,” a samurai (Rentaro Mikuni) regrets his choice of leaving his true love for advancement. Yuki (Keiko Kishi) is a harbinger of doom in “The Woman of the Snow.” Hoichi (Katsuo Nakamura) must have his entire body covered in prayer in “Hoichi, the Earless.” And Kannai (Kanemon Nakamura) finds a creepy face staring back at him in “In a Cup of Tea.” Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, Kwaidan is one of the greatest ghost story films ever made, four creepy, atmospheric existential tales that will get under your skin and into your brain. The score was composed by Tōru Takemitsu, who said of the film, “I wanted to create an atmosphere of terror.” He succeeded.

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

MY FIRST FILM + Q&A

My First Film takes audiences behind the scenes of the creative process through a long gestation

MY FIRST FILM (Zia Anger, 2024)
Roxy Cinema
2 Sixth Ave. at Church St.
Friday, August 30, 7:15
www.roxycinemanewyork.com
memory.is

“Did you know that most filmmakers spend their entire lives making some version of the same movie?” Vita (Odessa Young) says in Zia Anger’s My First Film, portraying the director’s onscreen doppelganger.

In 2010, Anger shot her first film, Always All Ways, Anne Marie, which was soon relegated to “abandoned” status on IMDB. In 2015, she made the nine-minute short My Last Film, starring Lola Kirke, Kelly Rohrbach, Rosanna Arquette, and Mac DeMarco, which screened at the New York Film Festival. In 2018, she toured her first movie as part of a live performance that slowly morphed into the feature-length My First Film, which has played numerous festivals and is being shown August 30 at the Roxy before streaming on MUBI. My First Film goes behind the scenes of Anger’s creative process as she revisits her earlier work; Reunion founder Sean Glass calls it “the making of the making of the making of . . .”

Comparing writing and directing to getting pregnant and giving birth, Anger and cowriter Billy Feldman employ split screens, voice-over narration, typewritten text, and other cinematic elements in blurring the line between fiction and reality, with exciting handheld phototography by Ashley Connor and a cast that includes Young, Devon Ross as the protagonist, Philip Ettinger as Vita’s boyfriend, Cole Doman, Sage Ftacek, Seth Steinberg, and Anger’s father, Ruby Max Fury.

The words “I’m not sure how to start this” are typed at the beginning of the film. “I am really happy you are watching, happier than you could ever know.” The 7:15 screening at the Roxy will be followed by a Q&A with Anger, Connor, Young, Ettinger, Doman, and Steinberg, moderated by actor and writer Annie Hamilton.

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

FANTASTIC FEST PRESENTS: THE OTHER LAURENS

Femme fatale Jade (Louise Leroy) and private dick Gabriel (Olivier Rabourdin) are on the case in The Other Laurens

THE OTHER LAURENS (L’AUTRE LAURENS) (Claude Schmitz, 2023)
Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Lower Manhattan
28 Liberty Street, Suite SC301
Friday, August 23, 10:15, and Saturday, August 24, 9:00
drafthouse.com
yellowveilpictures.com

Claude Schmitz’s retro-noir The Other Laurens is a clever, often hilarious film that melds a 1970s sensibility into a contemporary thriller.

Olivier Rabourdin is a riot as Gabriel Laurens, a low-rent private detective who seems to have walked straight out of an Aki Kaurismäki movie. A slovenly, lonely man, he’s taking care of his dying mother (Jeannine Arnaldi), who thinks he is his far superior twin brother, François, who recently died in what might not have been an accident.

One night, Gabriel’s teenage niece, Jade (Louise Leroy), shows up unexpectedly, dressed in black leather and smoking cigarettes, wanting to hire her uncle to investigate her father’s death, but Gabriel appears to no longer give a damn about anyone, including himself. He turns her down, but when he learns she is being followed, he agrees to take her back to her father’s mansion in Perpignan, near the French-Spanish border, where he is suspicious of François’s widow, Shelby (Kate Moran), Jade’s stepmother, who has surrounded herself with a team of motorcycle-riding dudes, led by Valéry (Marc Barbé), looking like they’re just itching to kill someone.

Shelby is knee-deep in some dirty dealings with powerful mob boss Alberto (Vicente Gil), and for support she has recruited her brother, military vet Scott (Edwin Gaffney), who is also in the mood for a fight. Meanwhile, a pair of oddball detectives, Alain (Rodolphe Burger) and Francis (Francis Soetens), keep popping up in unexpected places, adding comic relief tinged with more than a little danger.

Gabriel desperately wants to get away from everything and return to his dull, miserable life, but there appears to be no escape until he figures out just what the heck is going on, as evidenced by this fab piece of dialogue:

Gabriel: What are you going to do with your life, Jade?
Jade: I don’t know. Travel, maybe.
Gabriel: Travelling is good. Travel and lose yourself. See, it’s good to lose yourself.
Jade: Have you ever travelled?
Gabriel: Not enough. I didn’t lose myself enough.

Schmitz (Nothing But Summer, Carwash, Lucie Lost Her Horse), who wrote the film with Kostia Testut, fills The Other Laurens with fab flourishes of Quentin Tarantino, Sergio Leone, John Carpenter, John Dahl, and Jean Renoir, enhanced by a pulsating score by Thomas Turine and a bold palette painted by cinematographer Florian Berutti.

Rabourdin is a revelation as Gabriel, his hulking figure sagging with malaise, while Leroy is mesmerizing as the unpredictable Jade, who is photographed like a femme fatale Brigitte Bardot. The supporting cast all perform their tasks exceptionally well, with Burger and Soetens standing out as an Abbott and Costello / Laurel and Hardy kind of duo, but with guns. Stick around for a Burger bonus after the credits start rolling.

Winner of the Grand Prix and Best Actor at the Brussels International Film Festival, The Other Laurens is screening August 23 and 24 in Alamo Drafthouse’s Fantastic Fest, which also boasts such films as JT Mollner’s Strange Darling, Tinto Brass’s Caligula: The Ultimate Cut, and a tenth-anniversary presentation of Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook with special content.

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