this week in film and television

MLK DAY 2016

Multiple venues
Monday, January 18
www.mlkday.gov

In 1983, the third Monday in January was officially recognized as Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, honoring the birthday of the civil rights leader who was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Dr. King would have turned eighty-seven this month, and you can celebrate his legacy on Monday by participating in a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service project or attending one of numerous special events taking place around the city. BAM’s thirtieth annual free Brooklyn Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. includes a keynote address and book signing by Michael Eric Dyson, live performances by the Brooklyn Interdenominational Choir and Kimberly Nichole, the NYCHA Atlantic Terminal Community Center student exhibit “Picture the Dream,” master of ceremonies Eric L. Adams, and a special film screening. The JCC in Manhattan will host “Artists Celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.,” with a screening of Aviva Kempner’s documentary Rosenwald at 5:00, followed by a Q&A with the director, and “Idealism and Activism: A Conversation with Bill T. Jones” at 7:30 ($5, benefiting Saturday Morning Community Partners).

The Harlem Gospel Choir will play a special matinee at B.B. King’s on MLK Day

The Harlem Gospel Choir will play special matinees at B.B. King’s and the Children’s Museum of Manhattan on MLK Day

The Children’s Museum of Manhattan will teach kids about King’s legacy with the “Heroic Heroines: Coretta Scott King” book talk at 10:00 and 2:00 and the World Famous Harlem Gospel Choir at 3:00 and 4:00, while the Brooklyn Children’s Museum hosts the special hands-on crafts workshops “The Art of Protest” and “Protest Prints,” a noon screening of Rob Smiley and Vincenzo Trippetti’s 1999 animated film Our Friend, Martin, and the toddlers program “Storytime & Civil Movements.” The Museum at Eldridge Street will be hosting a free reading of Kobi Yamada and Mae Besom’s picture book What Do You Do with an Idea? along with a mural workshop. The Harlem Gospel Choir will also give a special MLK Day matinee at 12:30 ($22-$26) at B.B. King’s in Times Square, while Big Daddy Kane will take the mic with a live band at 9:00 ($15-$30).

NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL: PROJECTIONS OF AMERICA & THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A JEEP

Documentary reveals little-known U.S. propaganda efforts during WWII to show rest of world the American way of life

PROJECTIONS OF AMERICA (Peter Miller, 2015) & THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A JEEP (Irving Lerner, 1943)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Wednesday, January 13, 1:30 & 6:00
Festival runs January 13-26
nyjff.org

The twenty-fifth annual New York Jewish Film Festival gets under way January 13 with a look at a little-known part of the U.S. propaganda effort during WWII. In Projections of America, director Peter Miller details how the U.S. Office of War Information used specially made short documentary films to show the rest of the world the positive aspects of the American way of life, particularly as U.S. soldiers helped liberate many cities and countries in Eastern and Western Europe. “The films were idealized versions of what America could be, created by politically engaged filmmakers who, while fighting tyranny abroad, wanted also to fundamentally change America itself,” narrator John Lithgow explains. At the center of it all was Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert Riskin, who had written eight Frank Capra films, including It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and Meet John Doe. Riskin, fellow scribe and chief of production Philip Dunne (How Green Was My Valley, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir), and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, and FDR speech writer Robert E. Sherwood (The Petrified Forest, Abe Lincoln in Illinois) enlisted such directors and producers as John Houseman and Josef von Sternberg and such stars as Ingrid Bergman in making such short propaganda films as Swedes in America, Cowboys, Steel Town, The Valley of the Tennessee, and Watchtower over America, which people flocked to in Europe, North Africa, and even Germany. “It all came together as the greatest collection of filmmakers working toward one common goal that we will ever see,” notes film historian Cecile Starr.

Miller also interviews historians Ian Scott, Marja Roholl, and Stéphane Lamache, film critic Kenneth Turan, screenwriter David Rintels, and assistant film editor Aram Boyajian in addition to Normandy residents Michel Ollivier and Margit Cohn Siebner, Cummington resident Bill Streeter, French Resistance fighter Paul Le Goupil, Berlin resident Klaus Riemer, and German projectionist Heinz Meder. “We wanted to know: How did the Americans live?” Riemer remembers. In addition, Miller speaks with Riskin’s daughters Victoria and Susan and son Robert Jr., who talk about their father and mother, King Kong actress Fay Wray, with cherished memories. Projections of America is not only about the power of the movies but is also very much a love story between Riskin, a Jewish American from the Lower East Side, and the Canadian-born Wray, who appeared in some one hundred Hollywood films.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A JEEP uses the general purpose military vehicle as propaganda in short film

Projections of America features telling clips from many of these thought-to-be-lost shorts, including Arturo Toscanini, which was made to combat the evils of Fascism with footage of the great Italian conductor working in the West; The Cummington Story, about a small town that suddenly gets an influx of war refugees; and The Autobiography of a “Jeep,” which is being shown at the Jewish Film Festival along with Projections of America. The extremely popular nine-minute short anthropomorphizes the military vehicle, which got its name because of its “general purpose,” through first-person narration that equates it with the American soldier, except that it is 60-horsepower strong, 2200 pounds, 11 feet long, 5 feet wide, and 3 feet high. Among those photographed riding in a Jeep are Franklin D. Roosevelt, Laurel and Hardy, King George VI, Douglas MacArthur, and the Queen Mother as it hypes the future of the United States. Together, Projections of America and The Autobiography of a “Jeep” shed light on a fascinating aspect of what the country believed itself to be and what its hopes and dreams were for the future. The two films are screening on January 13 at 1:30 and 6:00 at the Walter Reade Theater and will be followed by Q&As with Miller; the festival, a joint project of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum, celebrates its silver anniversary with a slate of old and new gems, continuing through January 26 with such other films as Yared Zeleke’s Lamb, Amos Gitai’s Rabin, the Last Day, Andrzej Wajda’s Holy Week, Marianne Lambert’s I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman, and Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse as well as panel discussions and a master class with Alan Berliner.

STRATFORD ON HOUSTON: OTHELLO

Orson Welles’s OTHELLO kicks off Film Forum series commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of the death of the Bard (courtesy Carlotta Films)

OTHELLO (Orson Welles, 1952)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Wednesday, January 13, 12:30, 4:40, 9:15
Series runs January 13-21
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
www.carlottafilms-us.com

Film Forum follows up its two-week presentation of the restored version of Orson Welles’s spectacular Shakespearean adaptation, Chimes at Midnight, by kicking off its commemoration of the four hundredth anniversary of the death of the Bard, “Stratford on Houston,” with Welles’s Othello and the director’s cut of his Macbeth on January 13. Filmed in black-and-white over three years in multiple locations and ultimately employing five cinematographers, four editors, three Desdemonas, and two scores, it’s rather amazing that Welles’s 1952 independent production of William Shakespeare’s Othello was ever completed — of course, many Welles projects were not. That the final work turned out to be a masterpiece that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes speaks yet more to Welles’s genius. Welles, who directed the picture and plays the title character, streamlined the story into ninety-five minutes, getting to the heart of the most intense tale of jealousy and betrayal ever told. The film opens with shadowy shots of the dead Othello and his deceased wife, Desdemona (Suzanne Cloutier), carried aloft on biers at their dual funeral, to the sounds of an ominous piano and a mournful vocal chorus. The credits soon follow, after which Welles returns to the beginning, as the villainous ensign Iago (Micheál MacLiammóir) plots with Roderigo (Robert Coote) to convince Othello that his loyal and devoted wife is actually in love with the heroic soldier Michael Cassio (Michael Laurence).

At first Othello brushes away Iago’s concerns, but soon he is caught in Iago’s trap and starts to question the fairy-tale love he shares with his beautiful and trusting bride. As the story proceeds, characters are shown in extreme close-up, in narrow passages and doorways, amid medieval rooms with large columns and intricately designed windows, shadows looming everywhere; the stunning architecture, shot at disorienting angles, is a character unto itself. Welles did whatever it took to finish the film, including using his own funds from acting jobs and filming a scene in a bathhouse when costumes were unavailable, lending the proceedings a fragmented feel that evokes the mirrors in the finale of The Lady from Shanghai. Unfortunately, the syncing of the dialogue track is still often off and numerous cuts are too shaky, but they detract only a bit from the overall power and majesty of the film, a bold and brave take on a familiar Shakespeare tale given a dark new life by a master auteur. “Stratford on Houston” continues through January 21 with such other Shakespeare and Bard-related films as Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, Richard III, and Henry V, Fred McLeod Wilcox’s sci-fi classic, Forbidden Planet, Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, and Roman Polanski’s Macbeth.

LHOMME BEHIND THE CAMERA: LE SAUVAGE

Catherine Deneuve and Yves Montand star in Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s screwball romantic comedy, LE SAUVAGE

CinéSalon: LE SAUVAGE (THE SAVAGE) (LOVERS LIKE US) (Jean-Paul Rappeneau, 1975)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, January 12, $14, 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through February 23
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

The spectacularly gorgeous Catherine Deneuve and the ruggedly handsome Yves Montand play it for outrageous laughs in Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s screwball romantic comedy, Le Sauvage, aka Lovers Like Us. Deneuve is mesmerizing as Nelly, an unpredictable woman who lives by her wits, as if she is a feral child raised by wolves. She acts out instantly on her id, without concerning herself with the consequences and effects on other people. She is engaged to marry Vittorio (Luigi Vannucchi), a hot-blooded Italian who is none too happy when she bolts in the middle of the night. In need of money, Nelly goes to the nightclub where she worked for a year without getting paid, demanding her salary, but when slick manager Alex Fox (Tony Roberts) refuses to give her a dime, she takes off with his prized possession, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s “La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge.” She tries to sell the painting to the stranger in the hotel room next to hers, Martin (Montand), but when Vittorio wrongly assumes he is his fiancée’s lover, Martin gets caught up in the middle of some crazy silliness as well as legitimate danger. Soon Martin and Nelly are living on a deserted island, she on the run from Vittorio, he hiding from his mysterious past.

Nominated for four César Awards — Best Actress (Deneuve), Best Director, Best Cinematography (Pierre Lhomme), and Best Editing (Marie-Josèphe Yoyotte) — Le Sauvage can be, er, savagely funny as well as absurdly silly. The plot takes plenty of awkward twists and turns as the action moves from Caracas to the Bahamas, from the Virgin Islands to New York City and France. Much of the madcap comedy is overblown, but it’s still an awful lot of fun, primarily because Deneuve and Montand are a joy to watch, and Rappeneau never misses a chance to showcase her beauty (oh, when she is washing her hair and the camera cuts in on her . . .) and his machismo (even slyly referencing The Wages of Fear when Montand gets behind the wheel of his truck). Roberts shows off his slapstick skills, but the subplot involving Vittorio’s endless chase of a woman who doesn’t want him grows both tiresome and misogynistic, and Bobo Lewis is way too over the top as the odd Miss Mark. The delightful music by Michel Legrand goes hand in hand with Lhomme’s bright and cheerful cinematography, with scene after scene painted in lush pastel colors that dazzle the eyes. So it is rather appropriate that Le Sauvage is kicking off FIAF’s two-month tribute to the eighty-five-year-old French cinematographer, the subject of the CinéSalon series “Lhomme Behind the Camera,” screening at 4:00 and 7:30 on January 12 in Florence Gould Hall. The series continues through February 23 with such other Lhomme-lensed films as Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows, Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore, and Chris Marker and Lhomme’s Le Joli Mai.

TROUBLEMAKERS: THE STORY OF LAND ART

James Crump shines a light on TROUBLEMAKERS

James Crump shines a light on the iconoclastic earthworks artists — and such massive projects as Nancy Holt’s “Sun Tunnels,” above — in TROUBLEMAKERS

TROUBLEMAKERS: THE STORY OF LAND ART (James Crump, 2014)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, January 8
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
troublemakersthefilm.com

In the 1960s, a small group of experimental artists rejected the gallery system and the traditional art market by turning the planet into their canvas, creating monumental, often apocalyptic “earthworks” in far-off locations in the American Southwest that were nearly impossible to find. Director James Crump explores who these iconoclastic pioneers were and what they accomplished — and, in some cases, are still doing — in Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art. “The idea of land art is to relate to the idea of the globe, especially after the spaceship, the first picture of the earth, [gave] you the idea that earth is an object, so the idea for these artists after 1963 is that you can shape something, which is a sphere,” explains arte povera expert and art historian Germano Celant, who goes on to talk about the influence of airplane flight and Marcel Duchamp. “So the idea of looking from a high level is changing the perspective, your knowledge about art. And you can design it, you can draw. The area of view is a change in the history of art. It’s all this kind of convergence of information — technology, information, and history — that makes land art.” Crump (Black White + Gray) concentrates primarily on three artists, Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, and Walter De Maria, combining rarely shown archival footage, photographs, and film clips with old and/or new interviews of artists Carl Andre, Vito Acconci, Charles Ross, Willoughby Sharp, Lawrence Weiner, and Nancy Holt (Smithson’s widow) and gallerists Paula Cooper and Virginia Dwan.

James Crump interviews Lawrence Weiner about the land-art movement in TROUBLEMAKERS

Dwan, a major supporter of the land artists, shares compelling stories about the individuals, both their personalities and their working process, while Acconci discusses the movement from a more philosophical angle, referring to the minimalist, conceptual earthworks as “an exchange with nature” that was “a new kind of religious pilgrimage.” Using bulldozers, excavators, and even earthquakes as their brushes, these artists carved, dug, and constructed massive projects in places that very few people would ever get to see, more concerned with the earth, the sun, and the vast landscape of the planet than with creating art that could be shown in galleries and museums and sold to collectors and corporations. Crump examines such remarkable projects as Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” Heizer’s “Double Negative,” De Maria’s “The Lightning Field,” Holt’s “Sun Tunnels,” and Ross’s forty-plus-year work-in-progress, “Star Axis,” some of which you can still see today. But earthworks, which were in part a response to the Vietnam War, were not a rejection of the city itself; Troublemakers shows many of the artists hanging out at Max’s Kansas City on Park Ave., where they ate, drank, and made professional connections. But one artist who avoided that scene was Heizer, who just had a show at Gagosian in Chelsea and did not participate in the making of the documentary. “It’s not worth anything,” he says about his art. “In fact, it’s an obligation.” A refreshing look at an utterly intriguing moment in twentieth-century art — and at a movement that takes on new meaning as the planet is in peril as a result of climate change — Troublemakers opens January 8 at the IFC Center; Crump will participate in a Q&A following the 4:25 screening on January 9.

MONTHLY CLASSICS: GATE OF HELL

Machiko Kyō stars as a married woman being chased by an obsessed samurai in Teinosuke Kinugasa’s GATE OF HELL

GATE OF HELL (地獄門) (JIGOKUMON) (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1953)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Friday, January 8, $12, 7:00
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

Japan Society’s January edition of its Monthly Classics series harkens back to its past with Teinosuke Kinugasa’s lush, vibrant jidaigeki film, Gate of Hell; the society sponsored the movie’s U.S. premiere at the Guild Theatre in December 1954, the first Japanese color film ever to be shown in America. Set during the twelfth-century Heiji Rebellion, the samurai drama, based on a play by Kan Kikuchi, focuses on Morito Endo’s (Kazuo Hasegawa) dark, absurd obsession with Lady Kesa (Machiko Kyō), a married woman who is very much in love with her husband, Wataru Watanabe (Isao Yamagata). After protecting Lady Kesa and helping defend his lord, Morito is offered whatever he wants by Kiyomori the Monk (Koreya Senda). The court laughs at Morito when he asks for Lady Kesa’s hand in marriage, but when Kiyomori decides to humor him, Morito opts to pursue his goal, no matter the cost, or the humiliation.

Teinosuke Kinugasa’s award-winning GATE OF HELL is filled with lush colors and beautiful cinematography

Gate of Hell, which won the Grand Prix at the 1954 Cannes Film Festival and Best Costume Design (Sanzo Wada) and a special Honorary Foreign Language Film Award at the 1955 Oscars, was beautifully restored a few years ago, its dazzling colors now jumping off the screen in a barrage of eye-catching orange, turquoise, purples, greens, and reds. Kōhei Sugiyama’s breathtaking cinematography spectacularly captures Wada’s gorgeous costumes and both the indoor and outdoor sets, the deep, detailed compositions giving the film a rousing 3D feel, from a single red flower in a green field to two rows of men lined up in a room to a battle scene in the woods. The leads will be very familiar to Japanese film fans; Hasegawa appeared in nearly three hundred movies, including Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Crucified Lovers and Kinugasa’s Jujiro and Tsukigata Hanpeita, among others, while Kyō starred in Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu and Street of Shame, Yasujirō Ozu’s Floating Weeds, and Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another. The Monthly Classics series continues on February 5 with Kihachi Okamoto’s The Sword of Doom.

EYE ON A DIRECTOR — SHIRLEY AND WENDY CLARKE: THE CONNECTION

THE CONNECTION kicks off new film series at Museum of Arts & Design

THE CONNECTION (Shirley Clarke, 1962)
Museum of Arts & Design
2 Columbus Circle at 58th St. & Eighth Ave.
Friday, January 8, $10, 7:00
Series continues Friday nights through February 26
800-838-3006
madmuseum.org
www.milestonefilms.com

“Now look, you cats may know more about junk, see,” square film director Jim Dunn (William Redfield) says midway through The Connection, “but let me swing with this movie, huh?” Adapted by Jack Gelber from his play and directed and edited by Shirley Clarke, The Connection is a gritty tale of drug addicts awaiting their fix that was banned for obscenity after only two matinee screenings back in October 1962. In 2013, it was released in a sharp new fiftieth-anniversary print, beautifully restored by Ross Lipman of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, which you can see January 8 as it kicks off the Museum of Arts and Design’s new “Eye of a Director” series. The inaugural program, which continues on Friday nights through February 26, focuses on the work of Clarke and her daughter, documentary filmmaker Wendy Clarke. The Connection takes place in a New York City loft, where eight men are waiting for their man: Leach (Warren Finnerty), the ringleader who has an oozing scab on his neck; Solly (Jerome Raphael), an intelligent philosopher who speaks poetically about the state of the world; Ernie (Garry Goodrow), a sad-sack complainer who has pawned his horn but still clutches tight to the mouthpiece as if it were a pacifier; Sam (Jim Anderson), a happy dude who tells rambling stories while spinning a hula hoop; and a jazz quartet consisting of real-life musicians Freddie Redd on piano, Jackie McLean on sax, Larry Richie on drums, and Michael Mattos on bass. Dunn and his cameraman, J. J. Burden (Roscoe Lee Browne), are in the apartment filming the men as Dunn tries to up the drama to make it more cinematic as well as more genuine. “Don’t be afraid, man,” Leach tells him. “It’s just your movie. It’s not real.” When Cowboy (Carl Lee) ultimately shows with the stuff, Bible-thumping Sister Salvation (Barbara Winchester) at his side, things take a decidedly more drastic turn.

Mixing elements of the French New Wave with a John Cassavetes sensibility and cinema verité style, Clarke has made an underground indie classic that moves to the beat of an addict’s craving and eventual fix. Shot in a luridly arresting black-and-white by Arthur Ornitz, The Connection is like one long be-bop jazz song, giving plenty of time for each player to take his solo, with standout performances by McLean musically and Raphael verbally. The film-within-a-film narrative allows Clarke to experiment with the mechanics of cinema and challenge the audience; when Dunn talks directly into the camera, he is speaking to Burden, yet he is also breaking the fourth wall, addressing the viewer. Cutting between Burden’s steady camera and Dunn’s handheld one, Clarke adds dizzying swirls that rush past like a speeding subway train. A New York City native, Clarke, who died in Boston in 1997 at the age of seventy-seven, made such other films as The Cool World and Portrait of Jason and won an Academy Award for her 1963 documentary, Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World. The new print of The Connection is part of Milestone Films’ Shirley Clarke Project, which is preserving and restoring a quartet of her best work. The MAD series includes Ornette: Made in America, Portrait of Jason, and a shorts program as well as independent video artist Wendy Clarke’s Love Tapes, One on One, L.A. Link, and other films, the first time her work will be shown with that of her mother. “From my point of view, my mother could do anything,” Wendy Clarke, who will be at MAD for Q&As following screenings on February 5 and 12, explains on the series website. “She gave me the gift of gender confidence that she had to fight for. We had a very special relationship, one that not many artists that I know experienced. She was completely supportive of my work and we had long conversations about the potential of the video, film, dance, and painting mediums. My mother wanted us to show our work together and it has taken until the MAD retrospective for this to happen.”