this week in film and television

JEAN-PIERRE LÉAUD, FROM ANTOINE DOINEL TO LOUIS XIV: THE DEATH OF LOUIS XIV

The Sun King offers advice to his grandson in THE DEATH OF LOUIS XIV

The Sun King (Jean-Pierre Léaud) offers advice to the Dauphin (Francis Montaulard) in THE DEATH OF LOUIS XIV

THE DEATH OF LOUIS XIV (LA MORT DE LOUIS XIV) (Albert Serra, 2016)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, Howard Gilman Theater
144 West 65th St. between Eighth & Amsterdam Aves.
Opens Friday, March 31
Series continues through April 6
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org
www.cinemaguild.com

Albert Serra’s The Death of Louis XIV is the crowning achievement of Jean-Pierre Léaud’s majestic sixty-year career. Léaud first came to prominence in the late 1950s and 1960s, starring in François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel films (The 400 Blows, Stolen Kisses) and classics by Jean-Luc Godard (Masculin Féminin, Made in U.S.A.). In The Death of Louis XIV, we get to watch the seventy-two-year-old actor play a character dying, very slowly, portraying the last three and a half weeks of the Sun King’s life, the end of a seventy-two-year reign, the longest in French history. Based on actual accounts of the king’s death, including the memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon and Philippe de Courcillon de Dangeau, the film takes place primarily in Louis XIV’s bedchamber, where he is watched over by his valet (Marc Susini as Blouin), doctors (Patrick d’Assumçao as Fagon, Bernard Belin as Mareschal), and priests (Jacques Henric as Father Le Tellier, Philippe Dion as Cardinal de Rohan) and visited by sycophantic but concerned courtiers. Wearing a spectacular wig that makes him look like an elderly Max from Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, the king lies on his back, seldom speaking or moving, as he is poked and prodded and fed and the doctors consider amputating his infected leg. He gets polite applause when he swallows a bite of egg. A possible charlatan (Vicenç Altaió as Le Brun) gives him a supposedly magic elixir. He proffers advice to his grandson, Louis, Duke of Orléans (Francis Montaulard), who is destined to succeed him. Desperate to maintain his dignity, the king is soon as helpless as a newborn baby, dribbling as the end nears.

Doctors examine Louis XIVs gangrenous leg at Versailles in gorgeous, dark film by Albert Serra

The Death of Louis XIV was initially commissioned as a live installation for the Centre Pompidou, where Léaud would perform the Sun King’s death on a bed in a glass case over fifteen days. When that project was canceled for budgetary reasons, the actor and Serra, the Catalonian director who has previously made Honor of the Knights, about Don Quixote, Birdsong, about the three kings and the magi, and Story of My Death, about Casanova and Dracula, decided to turn it into a film, maintaining a similar claustrophobic feel. It’s photographed in almost agonizing detail by cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg using three cameras, so the actors, especially Léaud, never know which one to play to, adding a realistic element to the extraordinarily slow-moving proceedings, along with natural light and sound. Serra, who wrote the script with Thierry Lounas, and Ricquebourg favor long, dark close-ups from a motionless camera, each frame composed like a Caravaggio painting, although the director holds that was not his intention, claiming a more random and guerrilla-style approach. Léaud acts primarily with his face, using his narrow lips, heavy eyes, and every craggy line to show the once-proud monarch’s growing misery and fear as he withers away; one remarkable scene lasts more than four minutes without a cut, a mesmerizing tour de force of elegant simplicity. The film features gorgeous costumes by Nina Avramovic, fabulous hairstyling by Antoine Mancini, and stunning production design by Sebastian Vogler, bathed in alluringly shadowy reds, while editors Ariadna Ribas, Artur Tort, and Serra work their magic, transforming the three-camera shoot into a powerful, seamless narrative. It’s a darkly somber film that will get deep under your skin, a bravura baroque chamber opera led by a career performance by one of the world’s greatest actors. The Death of Louis XIV opens March 31 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in conjunction with the series “Jean-Pierre Léaud, from Antoine Doinel to Louis XIV,” which runs through April 6 and includes such films as Godard’s La Chinoise, Philippe Garrel’s La Concentration, Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore, Jacques Rivette’s Out 1: Spectre, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Porcile, and numerous Truffaut works.

MARTIN SCORSESE — GREAT RESTORATIONS: THE RED SHOES WITH THELMA SCHOONMAKER

Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) and Victoria Page (Moira Shearer) contemplate their future in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s THE RED SHOES

MARTIN SCORSESE RETROSPECTIVE: THE RED SHOES (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1948)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Sunday, April 2, $15, 7:00 (with Schoonmaker introduction)
Sunday, April 9, $15, 4:00
Series runs through October 23
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes is a lush, gorgeous examination of the creative process and living — and dying — for one’s art. Sadler’s Wells dancer Moira Shearer stars as Victoria Page, a young socialite who dreams of becoming a successful ballerina. She is brought to the attention of ballet master Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) and soon is a member of his famed company. Meanwhile, composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring), whose music was stolen by his professor and used in a Lermontov ballet, also joins the company, as chorus master. As Vicky and Julian’s roles grow, so does their affection for each other, with a jealous Lermontov seething in between. Inspired by Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, The Red Shoes is a masterful behind-the-scenes depiction of the world of dance, highlighted by the dazzlingly surreal title ballet, which mimics the narrative of the central plot. Based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, the fifteen-minute ballet takes viewers into a completely different fantasy realm, using such cinematic devices as jump cuts and superimposition as the drama unfolds well beyond the limits of the stage. To increase the believability of the story and make sure the dance scenes were effective, Powell and Pressburger enlisted players from the international dance community; the film’s cast includes Russian choreographer and dancer Léonide Massine as Lermontov choreographer Grischa Ljubov, French prima ballerina Ludmilla Tchérina as Lermontov star Irina Boronskaja, and Australian dancer Robert Helpmann as Ivan Boleslawsky; Helpmann also served as the film’s choreographer.

Victoria Page (Moira Shearer) gets immersed in a surreal ballet in classic dance drama THE RED SHOES

Brian Easdale won an Oscar for his score, which ranges from sweet and lovely to dark and ominous, with an Academy Award also going to Hein Heckroth’s stunning art direction and Arthur Lawson’s fabulous set design. The film was photographed in glorious Technicolor by Jack Cardiff. Upon meeting Vicky, Lermontov asks, “Why do you want to dance?” to which she instantly responds, “Why do you want to live?” No mere ballet film, The Red Shoes is about so much more. A newly restored 35mm print of The Red Shoes is screening April 2 at 7:00 in the Museum of the Moving Image series “Martin Scorsese: Great Restorations” and “Martin Scorsese Retrospective” and will be introduced by three-time Oscar-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who has worked on all of Scorsese’s films since Raging Bull and was married to Michael Powell from 1984 to 1990. (The film is also being shown April 9 at 4:00 without the introduction.) The series are being held in conjunction with the “Martin Scorsese” exhibition; upcoming screenings include Stuart Heisler’s Journey into Light, Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, and Sergei Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates.

BROOKLYN MUSEUM FIRST SATURDAY: BEYOND THE BLUES

Joseph Kosuth, “276 (On Color Blue),” neon tubing, transformer, and electrical wires, 1993 (© 2016 Joseph Kosuth / Artists Rights Society, New York. Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, April 1, free, 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum focuses on numerous aspects of the word “blue” in its April First Saturday program, “Beyond the Blues.” There will be live music and dance by the Martha Redbone Roots Project, Geko Jones and Chiquita Brujita with Fogo Azul and Aina Luz, the Brooklyn Dance Festival (with a workshop), and Queen GodIs with special guests; the pop-up poetry event “An Address of the Times” with Pamela Sneed, Heather Johnson, t’ai freedom ford, and Timothy Du White; a screening of Marcie Begleiter’s Eva Hesse, followed by a discussion with Helen Charash (Hesse’s sister) and producer Karen Shapiro; a hands-on art workshop in which participants can make marbled paper using the Japanese suminagashi (“floating ink”) technique; an Emerging Leaders of New York Arts booth where participants can write postcards in support of the arts, take part in a public art project, and take a #SaveTheNEA selfie; the lecture performance #sky #nofilter by Chloë Bass exploring racial trauma; and a “New York City Participatory Budgeting” program where people can propose and vote on projects in their community. In addition, you can check out such exhibits as “Iggy Pop Life Class by Jeremy Deller,” Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty,” “Infinite Blue,” “A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt,” and, at a discounted admission price of $12, “Georgia O’Keefe: Living Modern.”

AUTOCRATIC FOR THE PEOPLE: AN UNPRESIDENTED SERIES OF STAR-SPANGLED SATIRES / MUSICAL MIDNITES — SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER & UNCUT

Stan, Cartman, and Kenny can’t wait for SOUTH PARK movie to start at IFC Center

WEEKEND CLASSICS / NITEHAWK MIDNITE SCREENINGS: SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER & UNCUT (Trey Parker, 1999)
IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St. March 31 – April 2, 11:00 am, 212-924-7771
Nitehawk Cinema, 136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave., March 31 and April 1, 12:20 am, 718-384-3980
www.ifccenter.com
www.nitehawkcinema.com

IFC Center’s Trump-inspired “Autocratic for the People: An Unpresidented Series of Star-Spangled Satires” concludes March 31 – April 2 with Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s inimitable South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. Since 1997, Stone and Parker have been using colorful low-tech cutouts to dine on sacred cows, lambasting celebrities, politicians, religion, sexuality, the military, education, television, movies, corporations, pop culture, and just about everything else they can think of in the animated series South Park, which follows the travails of a group of eight-year-old boys in a small town in Colorado. In 1999, Eric Cartman, Kyle Broflovski, Stan Marsh, and Kenny McCormick got to star in their own feature-length animated film, in which they lead the resistance to save Terrance & Phillip while Kyle’s mom starts a war with Canada. They’re joined by such SP regulars as Chef, Mr. Mackey, Mr. Garrison, and Wendy Testeberger and such special guests as Satan, Saddam Hussein, and the mysterious Gregory, along with guest voicers George Clooney, Eric Idle, Minnie Driver, Dave Foley, and Brent Spiner. The musical numbers, written by Parker with Henry Mancini Award winner Marc Shaiman (Hairspray, Catch Me If You Can), are a riot, including the Oscar-nominated “Blame Canada,” “Uncle Fucka,” “Kyle’s Mom’s a Bitch,” and “What Would Brian Boitano Do?” Another fave is “I’m Super,” delivered by the irrepressible Big Gay Al, who sings, “Bombs are flying / People are dying / Children are crying / Politicians are lying too // Cancer is killing / Texaco’s spilling / The whole world’s gone to hell // But how are you? / I’m super / Thanks for asking!” A 35mm print will be screened at the way-too-early hour of 11:00 am from March 31 to April 2 as part of IFC’s Weekend Classics programming. Coincidentally, the film is also being shown — at the somewhat more reasonable time of 12:20 am — on March 31 and April 1 in the Nitehawk Cinema series “Musical Midnites.” Meanwhile, Stone and Parker, who also made the fab Team America: World Police, are preparing for the twenty-first season of South Park, which continues to have its finger squarely on the pulse of what is really going on in this country.

KARL MARX CITY

Documentarian Petra Epperlein investigates her father’s mysterious suicide in KARL MARX CITY

KARL MARX CITY (Petra Epperlein & Michael Tucker, 2016)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
March 29 – April 11
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
karlmarxcity.com

In 1999, filmmaker Petra Epperlein’s fifty-seven-year-old father, Wolfgang, thoroughly washed his company car, burned all of his personal papers and photographs, and then hanged himself from a tree in the family garden in their home in Chemnitz, which was known as Karl Marx City in what was formerly communist East Germany from shortly after the end of WWII to the fall of the Berlin Wall. “Much like Karl Marx City, her father set out to erase himself,” narrator Matilda Tucker, Epperlein’s daughter, says near the beginning of the intricately plotted and gripping documentary Karl Marx City. “All that he left behind were questions.” Fifteen years later, Epperlein, who has made such sociopolitical films with her husband, Michael Tucker, as Gunner Palace, The Prisoner Or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair, and Bulletproof Salesman — the duo call themselves Pepper & Bones — returned to Chemnitz to try to answer some of those questions and find out whether her father had killed himself because, as was rumored, he had collaborated with the Stasi, the much-feared East German secret police. Between 1950 and 1990, the German Democratic Republic employed 92,000 officers and 200,000 informants to spy on their own friends, neighbors, and family, using audio and video to track their every move in order to identify supposed enemies of the state. Written, directed, edited, and produced by Epperlein and Tucker — Petra also did the audio recording and Michael served as cinematographer and sound designer — Karl Marx City features declassified surveillance tapes, broadcast intercepts, and propaganda films from the Ministry for State Security (the Stasi, or Staatssicherheit) along with striking new black-and-white footage of Epperlein’s quest as she poignantly retraces her father’s steps. She meets with such current and former employees of the Stasi Archive as Lothar Raschker, Dr. Juliane Schütterle, and Dagmar Hovestadt, Cold War and GDR expert Dr. Douglas Selvage, and Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial director Dr. Hubertus Knabe to examine the history of the Stasi and detail the effects it had on the psyche of the German people.

Poignant documentary looks into Stasi control of Karl Marx City during the Cold War era

Epperlein also speaks with former classmate Jana X and her parents, Stasi collaborators R. and S., and historian and suicide-letter expert Dr. Udo Grashoff, who examines a note and postcard that Wolfgang sent Petra just before he killed himself. “The main question of the Stasi was, Who is the enemy, and how can we prove that he is an enemy or she is an enemy?” Dr. Grashoff points out. “But you and I, we have different questions. And we find in the files empirical material that allows us to answer our different questions, and this is the value of the Stasi files for me. I’m not interested in the questions of the Stasi. You can find your own truth.” Petra’s twin brothers, Uwe and Volker, and their mother, Christa, also talk about their father, with Christa sometimes hesitant and emotional. Visiting sites from her family’s past, Epperlein travels everywhere wearing headphones and carrying a large fur-covered microphone, emphasizing how her, and our, world is still under constant surveillance. “No aspect of society escaped their gaze,” Tucker narrates early on, referring to the Stasi. “Everyone a suspect. The enemy is everyone.” Epperlein occasionally addresses the camera directly, creating boundary-shattering moments between filmmaker and audience while evoking the ability of the camera and microphone to make us all subjects, particularly in this surveillance-heavy age. In addition, Karl Marx City offers a vocabulary lesson, defining such words as Die Wende (“the change”), Ostalgie (“the feeling for home”), Erinnerungskutlur (“the culture of remembrance”), and Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“the process of coming to terms with the past”), the letters shown onscreen in torn red-and-white strips as if ripped from tabloid headlines or ransom notes. Karl Marx City is an eye-opening look at a frightening past as well as a potent reminder of what can always happen again — if it isn’t already. The film opens March 29 at Film Forum and will be preceded by Alexander Lahl and Volker Schlecht’s seven-minute animated short, Broken — The Women’s Prison at Hoheneck; Epperlein and Tucker will participate in Q&As following the 7:00 shows on March 29 and 31 and the 4:40 show on April 1.

PERCEPTION: KNIFE IN THE WATER

A young hitchhiker (Zygmunt Malanowicz) throws a kink in a couple’s sailing plans in Roman Polanski’s KNIFE IN THE WATER

CABARET CINEMA: KNIFE IN THE WATER (NÓŻ W WODZIE) (Roman Polanski, 1962)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, March 17, 9:30
212-620-5000
rubinmuseum.org

“Even discounting wind, weather, and the natural hazards of filming afloat, Knife in the Water was a devilishly difficult picture to make,” immensely talented and even more controversial Roman Polanski wrote in his 1984 autobiography, Roman by Polanski. That is likely to have been a blessing in disguise, upping the ante in the Polish filmmaker’s debut feature film, a tense three-character thriller set primarily on a sailboat, filmed on location. Upper-middle-class couple Andrzej (theater veteran Leon Niemczyk) and Krystyna (nonprofessional actor Jolanta Umecka) are on their way to their sailboat at the marina when a young hitchhiker (drama school grad Zygmunt Malanowicz) forces them to pull over on an otherwise empty road. Andrzej and the unnamed man almost immediately get involved in a physical and psychological pissing contest, with Andrzej soon inviting him to join them on their sojourn, practically daring the hitchhiker to make a move on his wife. Once on the boat, the two men continue their battle of wills, which becomes more dangerous once the young man reveals his rather threatening knife, which he handles like a pro. Lodz Film School graduate Polanski, who collaborated on the final screenplay with Jerzy Skolimowski (The Shout, Moonlighting) after initially working with Jakub Goldberg, envelops the black-and-white Knife in the Water in a highly volatile, claustrophobic energy, creating gorgeous scenes intimately photographed by cinematographer Jerzy Lipman, from Andrzej and Krystyna in their small car to all three trying to find space on the boat amid the vast sea and a changing wind. Many of the shots are highlighted by deep focus in which one character is shown in close-up in the foreground with the others in the background, alerting the viewer to various potential conflicts — sexual, economic, class- and gender-based — all underscored by Krzysztof T. Komeda’s intoxicating jazz score featuring saxophonist Bernt Rosengren.

Things got kind of crowded while making KNIFE IN THE WATER

The first Polish film to be nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and winner of the Critics’ FIPRESCI Prize at the 1962 Venice Film Festival, Knife in the Water is screening March 31 in the Rubin Museum Cabaret Cinema series “Perception,” part of the institution’s latest Brainwave programming, and will be introduced by professor of psychology and neural science Dr. Clayton Curtis. “Perception” continues Friday nights through April 28 with such other mind-bending films as The Iron Giant, The Matrix, and Ghost in the Shell; meanwhile, Brainwave takes on such topics as “Keeping Your Eye on the Ball” with Patrick Vieira and John Krakauer on April 17, “Can we trust how our brain tells time?” with Ted Chiang and Dean Buonomano on April 21, and “What Makes a True Work of Art?” with Tobias Meyer and Frank Moore on April 26.

FOCUS ON FRENCH CINEMA: A MAN AND A WOMAN (WITH CLAUDE LELOUCH IN PERSON)

Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant play characters trying to escape their pasts in Claude Lelouch’s A MAN AND A WOMAN

A MAN AND A WOMAN (UN HOMME ET UNE FEMME) (Claude Lelouch, 1966)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, March 28, $40, 7:30
212-355-6100
fiaf.org

Winner of both the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman is one of the most popular, and most unusual, romantic love stories ever put on film. FIAF is celebrating the work’s fiftieth anniversary by screening a newly restored version on March 28 as part of the Focus on French Cinema festival, followed by a Q&A with the seventy-nine-year-old Lelouch, who has also made such films as Vivre pour vivre, Les Uns et les Autres, La bonne année, and La Belle Histoire, and writer-director Philippe Azoulay. In A Man and a Woman, Oscar-nominated Anouk Aimée stars as Anne Gauthier and Jean-Louis Trintignant as Jean-Louis Duroc, two people who each has a child in a boarding school in Deauville. Anne, a former actress, and Jean-Louis, a successful racecar driver, seem to hit it off immediately, but they both have pasts that haunt them and threaten any kind of relationship. Shot in three weeks with a handheld camera by Lelouch, who earned nods for Best Director and Best Screenplay (with Pierre Uytterhoeven), A Man and a Woman is a tour de force of filmmaking, going from the modern day to the past via a series of flashbacks that at first alternate between color and black-and-white, then shift hues in curious, indeterminate ways. Much of the film takes place in cars, either as Jean-Louis races around a track or the protagonists sit in his red Mustang convertible and talk about their lives, their hopes, their fears. The heat they generate is palpable, making their reluctance to just fall madly, deeply in love that much more heart-wrenching, all set to a memorable soundtrack by Francis Lai. Lelouch, Trintignant, and Aimée revisited the story in 1986 with A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later, without the same impact and success. There will also be a special twenty-minute excerpt from Azoulay’s upcoming documentary about Lelouch, Tourner Pour Vivre (Shoot to Live); the evening will conclude with an after-party featuring wine, cocktails, and hors d’oeuvres.