this week in film and television

LOOK NOW: THE UNIVERSE ACCORDING TO NICOLAS ROEG

John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) cradles his dead daughter (Sharon Williams) in Nicolas Roeg’s psychological horror masterpiece, Don’t Look Now

DON’T LOOK NOW (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
September 1, 9:00, September 3, 5:45, September 5, 6:55, September 7, 9:10
Series runs September 1-7
quadcinema.com

The Quad invites film lovers into the very strange cinematic world of eighty-nine-year-old British writer, director, and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg in the one-week series “Look Now: The Universe According to Nicolas Roeg,” beginning September 1. The eleven works in the series celebrate Roeg’s spectacular visual sense as well as his love of celebrity, the supernatural, and pop culture. The centerpiece of the Quad presentation is Roeg’s 1973 masterpiece, the haunting and harrowing psychological horror tale Don’t Look Now. Written by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant and based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier, the film is an extraordinarily rich and detailed study of a family trying to regain itself following the tragic loss of a young daughter. “Nothing is what it seems,” John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) says, alerting the viewer early on. In the opening, scene, Christine (Sharon Williams) and her brother, Johnny (Nicholas Salter), are playing outside, he in a blue jacket, riding his red bike over the green grass and through trees, she playing with a talking doll and red-striped white ball while wearing a red raincoat even though the sun is shining bright on a nearly cloudless day. Over Pino Donaggio’s gentle piano score, Anthony B. Richmond’s camera zeroes in on a puddle next to a pond, then editor Graeme Clifford cuts to a fire raging in a fireplace in front of which the children’s mother, Laura (Julie Christie), is reading about Lake Ontario and their father, John (Donald Sutherland), is looking at glass slides of a church in Venice he has been asked to restore. In one image of a stained-glass window, Christ, in a red robe, is cradling the lamb symbolizing sinners, while a figure in a red hood sits in a front pew, gazing up at it. The scene then shifts back to Christine in her red mac, seen reflected upside down in the pond. Johnny rides over a pane of glass, breaking it and falling to the ground. John looks up, sensing something. Laura reads aloud from her book. She innocently puts her hand to her mouth. Christine puts her hand to her mouth. John smiles at Laura. Johnny tries to fix one of the wheels on his bicycle. Christine throws the ball in the air. John tosses a pack of cigarettes to Laura. The ball splashes in the pond. John knocks over a glass. The ball swirls in the water. Red liquid oozes from the figure in the church slide. John feels something is wrong and heads outside. Johnny runs toward him. Christine, lying on her back, slowly submerges under the water. John rushes into the pond. Laura looks at the bloody slide. With a gasp, John dives under the water. Laura tosses the slide onto her book, Beyond the Fragile Geometry of Space. The blood spreads further across the slide as Donaggio’s music turns ominous. John lifts the lifeless body of his daughter out of the pond, letting out a heartbreaking howl. John is too late to save Christine. Laura sees what is happening and screams. Roeg cuts to a power drill marked with a red panel drilling into the wall of the church in Venice that John is renovating. It’s a spectacular scene, every second critical to the rest of the film and how it’s photographed and edited, dominated by the color red (along with sharp blues and greens), shattering glass, people falling, and water representing death as John and Laura try to put together the pieces of their devastatingly fractured life.

Laura (Julie Christie) and John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) try to get their fractured life back on track in Venice in Don’t Look Now

In a restaurant in Venice, the City of Canals, a pair of elderly sisters, Heather (Hilary Mason) and Wendy (Clelia Matania), stare at Laura and John. Heather, a blind woman with second sight, tells Laura that she can see Christine and that she is happy. Laura wants to believe her, but John is skeptical. The couple soon return to their hotel, where they engage in one of the most graphic sex scenes of its time, as Roeg cuts between their lovemaking and John and Laura getting dressed matter-of-factly afterward, the fiery emotion of their passion underscored by their practical desire to create another child. Meanwhile, a serial killer is on the loose in Venice, the victims being pulled from the canals. And John becomes obsessed with a figure in red he spots in the corners of the narrow streets and bridges of the city, wondering whether his dead daughter is trying to contact him. It all leads to an unforgettable finale of sheer genius. Viewers mustn’t look away from the screen for even a split second, as Roeg imbues each shot with power and meaning, from music and color to dialogue and cross-cutting, metaphorical clues and red herrings melding together, leaving nothing to chance.

Even the making of the film is filled with fascinating intrigue and classic stories. Wandering through Venice, Roeg came upon a church that was actually being renovated; coincidentally, it was named St. Nicolo dei Mendicoli, and there was already a sign on it that read “Venice in Peril.” When a stuntman refused to do a dangerous scene inside the church, Sutherland hesitantly did it himself, not knowing that the wire he was told would protect him was liable to break at any moment. For a long time it was rumored that the sex scene between Christie and Sutherland, which was added at the last moment, was not simulated but real, a claim vehemently denied by the participants (and one that did not make Warren Beatty too happy). Renato Scarpa, who plays the police inspector, could not speak English, so he performed his lines phonetically, not knowing what he was saying. And Roeg discovered Donaggio, a singer who had never composed a film score before, working on a gondola; Donaggio went on to compose the soundtrack for dozens and dozens of movies, including several for Brian De Palma. (Donaggio had already had a big hit with “Lo Che Non Vivo [Senza Te],” which Dusty Springfield turned into “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me.”) But all of that merely enhances what is already a remarkable film, one of the greatest psychological horror movies of all time, and one that begs to be watched over and over again because of its many intricacies and nuances. Roeg might be telling us not to look, but we can’t help ourselves. You’ll also never think of the color red again in quite the same way. In addition to Don’t Look Now and the below films, the Quad is also screening Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession, Castaway, Far from the Madding Crowd, Insignificance, Eureka, and Petulia, with such stars as George C. Scott, Theresa Russell, Tony Curtis, Gene Hackman, Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, Harvey Keitel, and Art Garfunkel, all either directed and/or photographed by Roeg.

Runaway siblings (Jenny Agutter and Luc Roeg) learn about life from an Aborigine (David Gulpilil, later to be seen in Peter Weir’s The Last Wave) in Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout

WALKABOUT (Nicolas Roeg, 1971)
Quad Cinema
September 1, 4:50, and September 2, 3:10
quadcinema.com

Nicolas Roeg’s first solo project, as director and cinematographer, is a beautiful film about a teenage girl (Jenny Agutter) and her young brother (Roeg’s real-life son, Luc Roeg) lost in the Australian outback after their father (John Meillon) tries to kill them. The full ninety-six-minute version soars when the siblings encounter an Aborigine (David Gulpilil, later to be seen in Peter Weir’s The Last Wave) on a walkabout, living off the barren land to prove his manhood. The film was written by Edward Bond, based on James Vance Marshall’s novel. Agutter went on to star in such films as Logan’s Run, Equus, and An American Werewolf in London.

Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg show off their acting chops in Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s very strange Performance

PERFORMANCE (Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, 1970)
Quad Cinema
Friday, September 1, 6:50, Sunday, September 3, 1:00, and Wednesday, September 6, 9:10
quadcinema.com

A British gangster on the run hides out with a psychedelic rock star in this strangely enticing film from writer-director Donald Cammell (The Demon Seed) and Nicolas Roeg (making his big-screen directorial debut as well as serving as cinematographer). James Fox didn’t know what he was getting into when he signed on to play Chas, a mobster who finds sanctuary with mushroom-popping rock-diva has-been Turner, played with panache by Mick Jagger. Throw in Anita Pallenberg, a fab drug trip, and the great “Memo to Turner” scene and you have a film that some consider the real precursor to MTV, some think a work of pure demented genius, and others find to be one of the most pretentious and awful pieces of claptrap ever committed to celluloid.

Anjelica Huston has a wicked blast in Nicolas Roeg’s Roald Dahl adaptation, The Witches

THE WITCHES (Nicolas Roeg, 1990)
Quad Cinema
Saturday, September 2, 1:15, and Tuesday, September 5, 5:00
quadcinema.com

Executive producer Jim Henson’s feature-film swan song is an enchanting tale of a young boy who, upon encountering a witches convention led by the evil Grand High Witch (Anjelica Huston), is given a tail — well, actually, he’s turned into a cute little mouse. The witches have come up with a plan to rid the world of children by turning them all into rodents, and little Luke (Jasen Fisher) and old Helga (Mai Zetterling) are the only ones who can stop them. However, this is no Stuart Little (Rob Minkoff, 1999); based on a wicked story by Roald Dahl and directed by Nicolas Roeg (whose 1973 stunner, Don’t Look Now, dealt with a couple’s agony over their dead child), The Witches is definitely not for little kids. The cast also includes turns by such British faves as Rowan Atkinson, Jane Horrocks, and Brenda Blethyn.

David Bowie made his feature-film debut in Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (Nicolas Roeg, 1976)
Quad Cinema
Saturday, September 2, 5:15, and Sunday, September 3, 8:00
quadcinema.com

Nicolas Roeg’s adaptation of Walter Nevis’s 1963 science-fiction novel, The Man Who Fell to Earth, is a nearly unwatchable unmitigated mess, with gorgeous visuals and beautiful individual scenes getting lost in a narrative nightmare. Written by Paul Mayersberg, the 1976 film served as a vehicle for androgynous pop star David Bowie, in his movie debut, playing television-addicted Thomas Jerome Newton, a soft-spoken alien who has come to Earth to figure out a way to save his water-starved planet. He enlists the aid of attorney Oliver V. Farnsworth (Buck Henry, in hysterically thick bottle glasses) and college professor and scientist Dr. Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn) as he builds up his World Enterprises Corporation and develops an awkward, volatile relationship with hotel employee Mary-Lou (Candy Clark). Editor Graeme Clifford can’t assemble the many hackneyed scenes into any kind of intelligible narrative; even the numerous sex scenes, in which we get to see various naked women as well as Torn’s schvantz and Bowie’s thin white duke, get confusing fast. Shortly before his death in January 2016 at the age of sixty-nine, Bowie participated in a musical adaptation of the film and novel, Lazarus, that was equally strange if somewhat more successful.

HOMAGE TO JEANNE MOREAU: THE TRIAL

Anthony Perkins stars as Josef K. in Orson Welles’s adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial

THE TRIAL (Orson Welles, 1962)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
September 1-7
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

“The Trial is the best film I have ever made,” Orson Welles told the BBC in a 1962 interview. While that might not be quite true — Welles already had Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, Macbeth, Othello, and Touch of Evil on his resume — his free-form adaptation of Franz Kafka’s posthumously published 1925 novel is an extraordinary work that has only been increasing in critical stature since its 1962 release. The absurdist drama now can be seen in a new restoration playing September 1-7 as part of a two-movie Film Forum tribute to Jeanne Moreau that also includes Jacques Demy’s Bay of Angels; Moreau passed away on July 31 at the age of eighty-nine. Welles reordered the narrative and changed the ending in telling Kafka’s harrowing tale of Josef K. (Anthony Perkins), a low-level bureaucrat who suddenly finds himself in the midst of a mysterious existential ordeal, under arrest for an unnamed crime and facing an unknown fate. Welles begins the film with Kafka’s “Before the Law” parable, told by the auteur over “pin-screen animation” by Alexander Alexeïeff and Claire Parker. Later, Welles, as Albert Hastler, known as the Advocate, repeats the story to Josef, confirming that Welles the filmmaker is fully in control, serving as judge, jury, and executioner of everything we see and hear — and we indeed hear a lot of Welles, who dubbed the voices for many of the characters himself. At the end of the opening parable, Welles explains, “’Tis been said that the logic of this story is the logic of a dream . . . of a nightmare,” and the camera then focuses in on Josef in bed, where he’s about to be roused and placed under arrest.

Josef has no idea what he’s done, shocked to find Inspector A (Arnoldo Foà) hovering over him and three of his coworkers searching the room of his landlady, Mrs. Grubach (Madeleine Robinson). His teenage cousin, Irmie (Naydra Shore), is concerned for him, and his uncle, Max (Max Haufler), takes him to see Hastler to beg the powerful Advocate to handle Josef’s case. As he gets more caught up in the puzzling conundrums, he meets such oddball characters as the pitiful Bloch (Akim Tamiroff), another Advocate client; the Chief Clerk (Fernand Ledoux); the Examining Magistrate (Max Buchsbaum); the Courtroom Guard (Wolfgang Reichmann); a priest (Michael Lonsdale); and painter Titorelli (William Chappell), whose bizarre tree-house-like studio is surrounded by giddy young girls. The locations are spectacular; lacking the necessary budget to build sets, Welles was going to use vast, empty spaces, but instead he accidentally came upon the abandoned Gare d’Orsay train station in Paris, which featured immensely large rooms that evoked an endless Baroque warehouse. He also shot in a Stalinist apartment complex in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, which evoked the cold uniformity of the lives of its citizenry. Each set offers surprises for the viewer, beginning with Josef’s bedroom, which cinematographer Edmond Richard (Chimes at Midnight, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeisie) shoots at skewed, low angles, keeping everything off balance while the tall Perkins struggles to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling, trapped from the very start.

Jeanne Moreau and Anthony Perkins play neighbors in Orson Welles’s The Trial

Josef goes on a metaphysical journey, accompanied by Tomaso Albinoni’s grand, emotional Adagio for Organ and Strings and jazzy noir, that takes him to Hastler’s bedroom, where the Advocate seems to spend most of his time sleeping, smoking, eating, and drinking instead of tending to his clients; a room stuffed with stacks of old, decaying files, as if there’s no longer any past; and an office with perfectly arranged rows and rows of robotic workers at desks. In a large courtroom, Josef picks up a law book, but it is thickly covered with dust, as if it hasn’t been opened in a long time, letting him know that justice is going to be hard to come by in this surreal world. He might think he is guilty of nothing, but in Welles’s conception of Kafka’s tale, anyone living within the constructs of this society is automatically implicated. Josef is also guilty of a certain kind of sexual misconduct with women; he is attracted to nearly every female he meets, whether single, married, or involved with another, including Burstner, Leni (Romy Schneider), Hilda (Elsa Martinelli), Miss Pittl (Suzanne Flon), and the court archivist (Paola Mori), stopping his supposedly desperate search for the truth to snag a kiss, a hug, or a possible quick roll in the hay, even if it complicates his mission. In so doing, Josef — and Welles, of course — condemns us all. “It’s the most autobiographical movie that I’ve ever made, the only one that’s really close to me,” Welles wrote of the film. “It’s much closer to my own feelings about everything than any other picture I’ve made.” That quote might indeed be true; despite all of the surreal absurdity in The Trial, there is something inherently frightening and believable about it, especially when viewed today, in a world dominated by surveillance, the surrender of private space, and a system of government with a rapidly deteriorating rule of law.

4 BY TERI GARR: ONE FROM THE HEART

Frannie (Teri Garr) and Hank (Frederic Forrest) try to hold on to their love in One from the Heart

ONE FROM THE HEART (Francis Ford Coppola, 1982)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Saturday, September 2, 7:20, and Sunday, September 3, 4:30
Series runs September 1-4
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

New York, New York meets La La Land in Francis Ford Coppola’s romantic musical fantasia, One from the Heart. The film, which famously bankrupted the director and his Zoetrope Studios when it was released in 1982, is screening September 2 and 3 in the four-day BAMcinématek series “4 by Garr,” a quartet of movies starring one of the best actresses of the 1970s and 1980s, Teri Garr. Garr, who will turn seventy in December, got her start as a backup dancer in a bunch of Elvis Presley movies, then went on to make such popular pictures as Mr. Mom with Michael Keaton, Oh, God! with George Burns and John Denver, Close Encounters of the Third Kind with Richard Dreyfuss, and The Black Stallion with Mickey Rooney. But her career was cut short when she became ill in 1999 and was later diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She has made very few public appearances in the last ten years, since suffering a brain aneurysm, but she continues to fight the disease. This series reminds us all what a terrific actress Garr was, her quirkiness and infectious charm ever-present onscreen. In One from the Heart, she plays Frannie, who works at the Paradise Travel agency with her best friend, Maggie (Lainie Kazan). Frannie lives with Hank (Frederic Forrest), a would-be musician who owns a surreal junkyard, called Reality Wrecking, with his best friend, Moe (Harry Dean Stanton). With their dreams drifting further and further out of reach, Frannie and Hank spend the Fourth of July separately; Frannie is intrigued by local piano player Ray (Raúl Juliá), while Hank has the hots for circus girl Leila (Nastassja Kinski). Fireworks are on the way, just not necessarily what was expected. Written by Coppola and Armyan Bernstein, the film is lushly photographed by Vittorio Storaro, who previously worked extensively with Bernardo Bertolucci and won an Oscar for his cinematography on Apocalypse Now. Storaro drenches the screen in oversaturated blues, reds, greens, and pinks, creating a dreamlike neon atmosphere in which scenes sometimes converge in unusual ways.

Frannie gets carried away by in famous Francis Ford Coppola disaster

Frannie (Teri Garr) gets carried away by Ray (Raúl Juliá) in famous Francis Ford Coppola disaster

Tom Waits’s lounge-music score features duets with Crystal Gayle that both enhance the mood and propel the plot, which could use a little help. Coppola re-created the Vegas strip at Zoetrope, with no location shooting; production designer Dean Tavoularis and art director Angelo P. Graham transformed Sin City into a dazzlingly fake place, as if existing only in the main characters’ minds. The film cost $26 million to make and took in less than $1 million at the box office, a disaster that puts it firmly in the pantheon with Cleopatra and Heaven’s Gate. But seen thirty-five years later, One from the Heart is not quite the failure it is usually believed to be. The sets are spectacularly over the top, Storaro’s use of color — on Forrest’s face alone — is otherworldly, and Waits’s songs can serve as a good distraction at just the right times. There are still a whole lot of cringeworthy moments that make no sense — let’s not get started on the airport mess — but, as with Heaven’s Gate, it’s not nearly as bad as legend would have it. And some of it is downright delightful. Garr owns her role from start to finish, whether putting up a window display or being carried naked through the streets. Keep a look-out for cameos by Waits and Rebecca de Mornay, along with Coppola’s parents in an elevator. The BAM series runs September 1-4 and also includes Mel Brooks’s classic Young Frankenstein, in which Garr plays the sexy Inga; Martin Scorsese’s cult fave After Hours, with Garr as a retro waitress; and Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie, in which Garr earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress as actress Sandy Lester, who competes for the same role as her friend and teacher, Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman).

TICKET ALERT: JOHN CLEESE AND MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL

john cleese monty python holy grail

NJPAC
1 Center St., Newark
Sunday, September 24, $44-$99, 3:00
973-297-5843
www.njpac.org

In 1975, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, Graham Chapman, and John Cleese made one of the funniest movies ever, the outrageously hysterical Monty Python and the Holy Grail. In the span of ninety-two minutes, the Monty Python troupe skewered royalty, government, religion, poverty, history, masculinity, the French, and just about everything else under the sun. On September 24, Cleese, who also starred in Fawlty Towers and was nominated for an Oscar for his screenplay for A Fish Called Wanda, in which he also played Barrister Archie Leach, will be at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center for a screening of Holy Grail, followed by a discussion with Montclair Film executive director Tom Hall. VIP tickets include a photo op with Cleese, who in the movie portrays Sir Lancelot the Brave (“We were in the nick of time. You were in great peril”), the Black Knight (“Just a flesh wound”), the French Taunter (“Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries”), Tim the Enchanter (“Well, that’s no ordinary rabbit”), and other roles.

CHARLIE PARKER JAZZ FESTIVAL 25th ANNIVERSARY

Multiple locations
August 23-27, free (some events require advance RSVP)
cityparksfoundation.org/charlieparker

City Parks Foundation’s annual Charlie Parker Jazz Festival turns twenty-five this year with a series of special events paying tribute to Bird, who lived in New York City from 1939 until his death in 1955 at the age of thirty-four. “In honor of this milestone we have expanded the program to five days, partnered with local institutions on family jazz events and open jam sessions, and are presenting a full evening of dance in the lineup for the first time. We hope all New Yorkers, young and old, jazz aficionados and new fans alike, will join us in honoring the legacy of Charlie Parker and jazz in New York City,” City Parks Foundation executive director Heather Lubov said in a statement. On August 23 at 7:00, the National Jazz Museum in Harlem will host “Harlem Speaks,” a conversation with alto saxophonist Lee Konitz. At 7:30, the New School will present “Bird with Strings,” an ensemble of students and veteran players performing the 1950 album Charlie Parker with Strings, featuring such classics as “April in Paris” and “Summertime.” At 10:00 pm, the Shed Open Jam takes place at Silvana. On August 24 at 5:30, Jazz in the Garden features Art Baron playing at the 6BC Botanical Garden. At 6:00, the New School for Jazz & Contemporary Music will screen Kasper Collin’s 2017 documentary I Called Him Morgan. At 7:00 in Marcus Garvey Park, Jason Samuels Smith’s “Chasin’ the Bird Remixed” brings together tap dancer and choreographer Smith, Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, and Derick K. Grant dancing to Parker’s “Donna Lee,” “Salt Peanuts,” and others, preceded by a Walk to SummerStage with the New York Road Runners Club. And at 9:00, the “In Bird We Trust” jam session takes place at Ginny’s Supper Club. On August 25 at 5:30, Jazz in the Garden features Bill Saxton in the Harlem Rose Garden, while at 7:00 the Anat Cohen Tentet plays in Marcus Garvey Park. On August 26 at 3:00, Marcus Garvey Park will be home to a fab concert with the Lee Konitz Quartet, Terri Lyne Carrington and Social Science, Louis Hayes, and Charenée Wade. And on Sunday, the grand finale moves to Tompkins Square Park at 3:00 with the Joshua Redman Quartet, Lou Donaldson, Tia Fuller, and Alicia Olatuja. All events are free; some require advance RSVP.

JONATHAN DEMME: HEART OF GOLD — NEIL YOUNG TRUNK SHOW / NEIL YOUNG: HEART OF GOLD

Neil Young lets it all hang out in Jonathan Demme concert film (photo by Larry Cragg)

NEIL YOUNG TRUNK SHOW (Jonathan Demme, 2009)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Sunday, August 20, 7:00
Series runs through August 24
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.trunkshowmovie.com

BAMcinématek’s three-week tribute to Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme, who passed away in April at the age of seventy-three, continues with a pair of outstanding concert films. In April 2005, Neil Young underwent brain surgery for an aneurysm. Four months later, he gathered together friends for two special nights at Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium, captured on film by Demme, who had previously helmed such fab music docs as Stop Making Sense and Storefront Hitchcock. Neil Young: Heart of Gold was an intimate portrait of man who looked death in the face and survived; the film featured acoustic songs primarily from Young’s beautiful Prairie Wind album. But the Godfather of Grunge wasn’t about to let a little thing like a brain aneurysm stop him from rocking in the free world. As he continued his long-term project of reaching deep into his past for his archival box sets, he released Chrome Dreams II in October 2007, a sequel to an unreleased 1977 album that was rumored to include such future Young classics as “Pocahontas,” “Like a Hurricane,” “Homegrown,” and “Powderfinger.” For Chrome Dreams II, Young strapped on the electric guitar and held nothing back, joined by longtime partners in crime Ralph Molina on drums, Rick Rosas on bass, and Ben Keith on guitars and keyboards.

Young took the show on the road, playing small clubs across the country, where each song was announced by a live painting by Eric Johnson. Demme captured two searing performances at the Tower Theater in Pennsylvania, filming them guerrilla-style with eight cameras, mostly handheld, that get right up in Young’s face. While the actual concerts were divided into two separate sets, first solo acoustic, then electric with the band, which also featured backup vocals by then-wife Pegi Young and Anthony “Sweetpea” Crawford, Demme mixes them up in Neil Young Trunk Show, an exhilarating music documentary that limits behind-the-scenes patter and instead concentrates on the powerful music. At the time, Young had been at the game for nearly fifty years, but he plays with a young man’s abandon in the film, his eyes deep in thought on such gorgeous acoustic gems as “Harvest,” “Ambulance Blues,” “Sad Movies,” and “Cowgirl in the Sand” while really letting loose with extended jams on the new “Spirit Road” and “No Hidden Path” before tearing everything apart on “Like a Hurricane.” The sixty-two-year-old Canadian legend even includes an instrumental from his high school days with the Squires, “The Sultan,” complete with Cary Kemp banging a gong. As with most Young concerts, Trunk Show is not about the greatest hits; to truly enjoy it, just let the music take you away – and make sure the theater has the volume turned up loud. The movie is screening August 20 at 7:00 as part of the “Jonathan Demme: Heart of Gold” retrospective and will be followed by a Q&A with cinematographer Declan Quinn and camera operators Charlie Libin, Kathleen Corgan, Gerard Sava, Patrick Capone, Hollis Meminger, and Anthony Jannelli.

Jonathan Demme will present NEIL YOUNG: HEART OF GOLD at Stranger Than Fiction screening at IFC Center on October 18

Neil Young reveals his heart of gold in Jonathan Demme concert film

NEIL YOUNG: HEART OF GOLD (Jonathan Demme, 2006)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Sunday, August 20, 4:30
Series runs through August 24
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

The BAMcinématek screening of Neil Young Trunk Show will be preceded by another stellar collaboration between Jonathan Demme and Neil Young, Neil Young: Heart of Gold. In March 2005, less than a week before a scheduled operation for a brain aneurysm, Canadian country-folk-rock legend Neil Young headed to Nashville, assembled friends and family, and in four days recorded one of the best — and most personal — albums of his storied four-decade career, Prairie Wind. On August 18, he had recovered enough to put on a poignant show at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, captured on film by Demme, whose previous music-related works included Talking Heads in Stop Making Sense, Robyn Hitchcock in Storefront Hitchcock, and videos by the Pretenders and Bruce Springsteen. The concert film begins with brief interviews with band members as they prepare for the show; Demme does not harp on Young’s health but instead focuses on the music itself and the warming sense of a family coming together. And what music it is.

Using an ever-changing roster of participants, including Emmylou Harris, then-wife Pegi Young, steel guitarist Ben Keith, keyboardist Spooner Oldham, bass player Rick Rosas, the Nashville String Machine, the Fisk University Jubilee Singers, the Memphis Horns, and others, Young goes song by song through Prairie Wind (skipping only the Elvis tribute “He Was the King,” which can be found as an extra on the DVD), a moving album written by a man looking death squarely in the face. (Pegi Young points out that it was like Neil’s life flashing before his eyes.) Young introduces several songs with stories about his recently deceased father, growing up on a chicken farm, his daughter’s departure for college, and Hank Williams, whose guitar Young plays. (He also does a few songs on a Steinway.) Cinematographer Ellen Kuras (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan) gets up close and personal with Young, zooming in for extended shots of his face, his eyes peeking out from under his cowboy hat. Eleven years later, Young is still at the top of his game, releasing great new music and playing incendiary live shows. “Jonathan Demme: Heart of Gold” continues through August 24 with The Master Builder, Ricki and the Flash, a program of music videos, and a double feature of What’s Motivating Hayes and Haiti Dreams of Democracy.

FILM PREMIERE, GROUP MEDITATIONS, AND MONASTIC ENCOUNTERS: WALK WITH ME

Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn practices mindfulness in new documentary

WALK WITH ME (Max Pugh & Marc J. Francis, 2017)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
August 18-26
212-620-5000
walkwithmefilm.com
rubinmuseum.org

In 2011, Franco-British documentarian Max Pugh was asked by an elder monk to make a film about Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching tour of the United States and Canada. Pugh, whose younger brother had become a Buddhist monk studying with Thich Nhat Hanh, teamed up with codirector Marc J. Francis to follow the popular Vietnamese master as he and his monastics visited various towns and cities in North America before returning to their home base, Plum Village, in the southwest of France. The result is the gentle, meditative, and poetic Walk with Me, which is having its New York premiere at the Rubin Museum. In agreeing to the film, Thich Nhat Hanh, who was born in Vietnam in 1926, conveyed that he did not want to be the focus of the narrative; instead, Pugh and Francis, who also served as producers, editors, and cinematographers, concentrate on a group of monastics who, as the tour continues, perform rituals, chant, get their hair cut off, and go about their daily duties. There are no labels identifying anyone by name, no text telling viewers the date or location, no talking heads discussing Buddhism, Thich Nhat Hanh, or his teachings. Every once in a while they break away from the fly-on-the-wall narrative to present voice-over recitations by Benedict Cumberbatch, reading from Thich Nhat Hanh’s Fragrant Palm Leaves journals from the 1960s as the camera sets its sights on scenes from nature, from snow rushing past trees to shimmering reflections on a lake. “At first, it seemed like a passing cloud, but after several hours I began to feel my body turning to smoke and floating away,” Cumberbatch says as clouds slowly make their way across the moon. “I became a faint wisp of a cloud. I had always thought of myself as a solid entity, and suddenly I saw that I am not solid at all. I saw that the entity I had taken to be me was really a fabrication. My true nature, I realized, was much more real, both uglier and more beautiful than I could ever have imagined.”

The film works best when Thich Nhat Hanh, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967, is present and when his words are read by Cumberbatch, offering an enveloping warmth and solace. As the master, who was exiled from his home country by both sides because of his opposition to the Vietnam War, ventures through natural settings, often wearing his brown knit cap, his eyes take in everything around him, zeroing in on the present moment, experiencing a constant state of mindfulness. It’s not nearly as interesting when it shows the monastics — Sister An Nghiem, Sister Dang Nghiem, Brother Phap Huu, Brother Phap Linh, Brother Phap Dung, Brother Phap De, Brother Phap Sieu, and Sister Dinh Nghiem — interacting with prisoners, discussing why they became monks, tracing their personal history, and meeting up with long-lost friends or visiting with relatives. The film concludes with a glorious sunset, as one day ends and another one is ready to begin. Shortly after filming was completed, Thich Nhat Hanh suffered a debilitating stroke, in November 2014, but his mindfulness programs and humanitarian foundation continue. Walk with Me is screening at the Rubin August 18-26, with all three shows on August 19 featuring some combination of group meditation (in conjunction with the sound installation “Le Corps Sonore”), a monastic encounter, and/or a Q&A with Francis, Pugh, and some of the monks from the film. In addition, on August 19 at 10:00 am, there will be a free pop-up, monastic-led group meditation in Union Square Park that will also be livestreamed here.