this week in film and television

13 CATS

There is something under the bed and everywhere else in JU-ON: THE GRUDGE

There is something scary under the bed — and just about everywhere else — in JU-ON: THE GRUDGE and rest of “13 Cats” series at BAM

JU-ON: THE GRUDGE (Takashi Shimizu, 2002)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Thursday, October 27, 9:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

“Black cats feature in the mythology of many cultures, and superstitions about them are still familiar to most of us in modern times. They are a prime example of the contrariness of many of our superstitious beliefs; some swear they’re lucky, others see them as a sign of certain doom,” Chloe Rodes writes in Black Cats and Evil Eyes: A Book of Old-Fashioned Superstitions. BAMcinématek certainly had the latter in mind when it programmed its Halloween series “13 Cats,” a baker’s dozen of feline horror stories running through November 3 at BAM Rose Cinemas. The frightfest kicked off October 21-23 with the Hayao Miyzazaki favorite Kiki’s Delivery Service and also includes the Nobuhiko Obayashi cult classic Hausu, Roger Corman’s The Tomb of Ligeia, David Lowell Rich’s Eye of the Cat, Kaneto Shindô’s Kuroneko, and both Jacques Tourneur’s and Paul Schrader’s Cat People. On October 27, Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On: The Grudge will cross movie fans’ path in Brooklyn. After making two Ju-Ons for Japanese video, Shimizu wrote and directed this feature-length haunted-house movie that he later also turned into an American version starring Sarah Michelle Gellar. A terrifying ghost (Takaka Fuji) who emits bizarre sounds keeps killing just about anyone who enters her suburban home, where a husband murdered his wife and their black cat, and their young son went missing. But don’t worry; the white-faced kid (Yuya Ozeki) continually shows up in the strangest of places, as does a very creepy woman. (Don’t look under the sheets.) The more Rika (Megumi Okina) gets involved, the spookier things get. And poor Izumi (Misa Uehara) and Hitomi (Misaki Itô). You’re likely to have trouble falling asleep after watching this truly scary, extremely confusing film, which Shimizu was afraid would be too laughable.

Hayao Miyazaki’s MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO wonderfully captures the joys and fears of being a child

MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
October 28-30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.nausicaa.net

In many ways a precursor to Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece, Spirited Away, the magical My Neighbor Totoro is a fantastical trip down the rabbit hole, a wondrous journey through the sheer glee and universal fears of childhood. With their mother, Yasuko (voiced by Lea Salonga), suffering from an extended illness in the hospital, Satsuki (Dakota Fanning) and her younger sister, Mei (Elle Fanning), move to a new house in a rural farming community with their father, anthropology professor Tatsuo Kusakabe (Tim Daly). Kanta (Paul Butcher), a shy boy who lives nearby, tells them the house is haunted, and indeed the two girls come upon a flurry of black soot sprites scurrying about. Mei also soon discovers a family of totoros, supposedly fictional characters from her storybooks, living in the forest, protected by a giant camphor tree. When the girls fear their mother has taken a turn for the worse, Mei runs off on her own, and it is up to Satsuki to find her. Working with art director Kazuo Oga, Miyazaki paints My Neighbor Totoro with rich, glorious skies and lush greenery, honoring the beauty and power of nature both visually as well as in the narrative. The scene in which Satsuki and Mei huddle with Totoro (Frank Welker) at a bus stop in a rainstorm is a treasure. (And just wait till you see Catbus’s glowing eyes.) The movie also celebrates the sense of freedom and adventure that comes with being a child, without helicopter parents and myriad rules suffocating them at home and school. (Note: BAM will be screening the English-language version in the “13 Cats” series.)

BEYOND THE INGÉNUE: ADIEU PHILIPPINE

ADIEU PHILIPPINE

Liliane (Yveline Céry), Juliette (Stefania Sabatini), and Michel (Jean-Claude Aimini) have some wild adventures in ADIEU PHILIPPINE

CINÉSALON: ADIEU PHILIPPINE (Jacques Rozier, 1962)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, October 25, $14, 4:00 & 7:30
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

FIAF’s two-month CinéSalon series “Beyond the Ingénue” comes to a close October 25 with one of the lesser-known French New Wave classics, Jacques Rozier’s shamefully seldom screened Adieu Philippine. Rozier’s first film is a freewheeling adventure as Michel (Jean-Claude Aimini), a young man working in a television studio, cavorts with a pair of eighteen-year-old best friends, Juliette (Stefania Sabatini) and Liliane (Yveline Céry), while waiting to be called up to serve in the Algerian War. Rozier opens the film by taking viewers into the studio, where they are shooting a lively jazz performance by French violinist Maxim Saury and his band, the bouncy rhythm meeting the behind-the-scenes chaos. Pretending to be more important than he really is, Michel invites Juliette and Liliane to come in, and soon the trio is hitting cafés and nightclubs, camping on the beach, and trying to hook up with would-be filmmaker Pachala (Vittorio Caprioli). But what started out as fun gets somewhat more serious as jealousy creeps in and the war intervenes.

ADIEU PHILIPPINE

A trio of young French dreamers fight ennui and prepare for war in Jacques Rozier’s seldom-screened ADIEU PHILIPPINE

Adieu Philippine is an exhilarating tale of teenage freedom, of youth taking advantage of all life has to offer no matter one’s circumstance, fighting off ennui with a mad desire to just have fun. Rozier, who wrote the screenplay with Michèle O’Glor, allowed the cast of mostly nonprofessional actors to improvise and dubbed in dialogue later, resulting in less-than-stellar syncing that took two years in postproduction but thankfully gets lost in all the wild abandon. In his debut feature, cinematographer René Mathelin (Pardon Mon Affaire, The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe) shoots guerrilla-style in black-and-white, a kind of cinéma vérité in which passersby and people in the background often look at the camera, wondering what is going on. Adieu Philippine shares a soul and spirit with the early work of such auteurs as Jean-Luc Godard (1960’s Breathless), a friend and supporter of Rozier’s; American-born French photographer and documentarian William Klein (1958’s Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?), and François Truffaut, whose similarly themed Jules et Jim was also released in 1962, but Adieu Philippine has a charm all its own. Rozier, who turns ninety on November 10, would make only a handful of other features, including 1985’s Maine-Ocean and 2001’s Martingale. A new 35mm print of Adieu Philippine is being shown at FIAF on October 25 at 4:00 and 7:30; the later screening will be introduced by New York Review of Books editor Madeleine Schwartz.

HALLOWEEN AT NITEHAWK: LES DIABOLIQUES

Simone Signoret and Vera Clouzot are up to no good in classic French thriller

CRIME: LES DIABOLIQUES (DIABOLIQUE) (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955)
Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave.
Saturday, October 15, and Sunday, October 16, 11:30 am
718-384-3980
www.nitehawkcinema.com

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques is a masterpiece of suspense, a psychological thriller that never lets up. This intense noir stars Véra Clouzot as Christina Delassalle, the mousy owner of a private school for boys run by her nasty, sadistic husband, Michel (Paul Meurisse), who is having an affair with teacher Nicole Horner (Simone Signoret). Nicole conspires with Vera to murder Michel and dump his body in a pool, and the plan works, if not exactly perfectly. Shortly after that, a young student claims to have seen the headmaster alive, frightening Christina and forcing Nicole to — well, we’ve already said too much. As the end credits say, “Don’t be devils. Don’t ruin the interest your friends could take in this film. Don’t tell them what you saw.” Les Diaboliques is based on the novel Celle qui n’était pas (The Woman Who Was No More) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, who also wrote D’entre les morts (The Living and the Dead), which was turned into the Alfred Hitchcock classic Vertigo. Sadly, Véra Clouzot, wife of director Henri-Georges, died five years after Les Diaboliques came out, at the age of forty-six, of a heart condition. Les Diaboliques is screening October 14-15 at the diabolically early time of 11:30 am at the Nitehawk Cinema as part of its “Brunch Screenings,” “Crime,” and “Halloween at Nitehawk” series. The Halloween series continues through October 29 with such horror favorites as Takashi Miike’s awesome Audition, John Carpenter’s classic original Halloween, Tod Browning’s Dracula, Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter, and Charles Barton’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

STRANGER THAN FICTION — NEIL YOUNG: HEART OF GOLD

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

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

NEIL YOUNG: HEART OF GOLD (Jonathan Demme, 2006)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Tuesday, October 18, $17, 7:00
Series runs Tuesday nights through November 1
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

For the last four decades, Baldwin-born writer-director Jonathan Demme has alternated between fiction films and documentaries, releasing such features as Something Wild, The Silence of the Lambs, and Philadelphia as well as such real-life tales as Haiti: Dreams of Democracy, Cousin Bobby, and Neil Young Trunk Show. IFC Center is dedicating its complete fall Stranger Than Fiction season to the latter, screening six Demme documentaries on successive Tuesday nights, each followed by a Q&A with the Oscar-winning director. The series began with Stop Making Sense, Swimming to Cambodia, and The Agronomist; on October 18, STF will present one of Demme’s very best, 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 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 Jonathan 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, keyboarist 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 appears as a DVD extra), 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. The Stranger Than Fiction series continues October 25 with the New Orleans-set I’m Carolyn Parker: The Good, the Mad, and the Beautiful before concluding November 1 with Jimmy Carter Man from Plains.

ARTIST TALK AND SCREENING: MARY REID KELLEY WITH PATRICK KELLEY

The Thong of Dionysus

Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley will screen and discuss their 2015 short film, THE THONG OF DIONYSUS, on the High Line on October 14

Who: Mary Reid Kelley, Patrick Kelley
What: Artist talk and screening
Where: The High Line, 14th Street Passage, West 14th Street at 10th Ave.
When: Friday, October 14, free with advance registration, 6:00
Why: Originally scheduled for October 12, the High Line Art talk and screening with multidisciplinary artist Mary Reid Kelley and her collaborator husband Patrick Kelley, focusing on one of the films in their current High Line Channel 14 exhibition, “We’re Wallowing Here in Your Disco Tent,” a collection of five shorts that meld Greek mythology with historical references, has been moved to October 14 at 6:00. South Carolina native Reid Kelley and Kelley will be at the 14th Street Passage, taking attendees behind the scenes of the making of their 2015 short film The Thong of Dionysus, the finale to Reid Kelley’s Minotaur trilogy, in which Dionysus, Ariadne, and the Minotaur search for a “raisin to live.” In the nine-and-a-half-minute unusual comedy, Dionysus proclaims, “Let a liquid lunch launch us into the unconscious,” leading to a wild tale in which Kelley portrays all the characters. Continuing through November 2 from 6:00 each night until the park closes, “We’re Wallowing Here in Your Disco Tent” also features Camel Toe, The Queen’s English, The Syphilis of Sisyphus, and Sadie, the Saddest Sadist.

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL SPOTLIGHT ON DOCUMENTARY: KARL MARX CITY

Documentarian Petra Epperlein investigates her fathers mysterious past in 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 Society of Lincoln Center
West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
Friday, October 14, Walter Reade Theater, $15, 8:30
Saturday, October 15, Francesca Beale Theater, $15, 12:30
Festival runs September 30 – October 16
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.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.

Documentary looks into Stasi control of Karl Marx City

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 is screening October 14 & 15 in the Spotlight on Documentary section of the New York Film Festival, with both shows followed by a Q&A with Pepper & Bones.