this week in film and television

PIERROT LE FOU

Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina are excited about brand-new restoration of Jean-Luc Godard classic

PIERROT LE FOU (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
December 18-24
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

Art, American consumerism, the Vietnam and Algerian wars, Hollywood, and cinema itself get skewered in Jean-Luc Godard’s fab faux gangster flick / road comedy / romance epic / musical Pierrot Le Fou. Based on Lionel White’s novel Obsession, the film follows the chaotic exploits of Ferdinand Griffon (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina, Godard’s then-wife), former lovers who meet up again quite by accident. The bored Ferdinand immediately decides to leave his wife and family for the flirtatious, unpredictable Marianne, who insists on calling him Pierrot despite his protestations. Soon Ferdinand is caught in the middle of a freewheeling journey involving gun running, stolen cars, dead bodies, and half-truths, all the while not quite sure how much he can trust Marianne.

Filmed in reverse-scene order without much of a script, the mostly improvised Pierrot Le Fou was shot in stunning color by Raoul Coutard. Many of Godard’s recurring themes and styles appear in the movie, including jump cuts, confusing dialogue, written protests on walls, and characters speaking directly at the audience, who are more or less along for the same ride as Ferdinand. And as with many Godard films, the ending is a doozy. Two years ago, when the film was shown at Anthology Film Archives as part of a series selected by John Zorn, the avant-garde musician explained, “Pierrot holds a special place in my heart — I am really a Romantic, not a Postmodern — and this film’s music never ceases to reduce me to tears.” You can see and hear for yourself December 18-24 when Film Forum unveils the brand-new fiftieth-anniversary restoration of this Nouvelle Vague favorite.

A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS 2015

Macy’s holiday window display celebrates fiftieth anniversary of A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS (photo byt twi-ny/mdr)

Macy’s holiday window display celebrates fiftieth anniversary of A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Fifty years ago, on December 9, 1965, CBS broadcast what was to become an all-time holiday favorite, Charles M. Schulz’s A Charlie Brown Christmas. The twenty-five-minute animated program was directed by Walt Disney and Warner Bros. veteran Bill Melendez and featured a jazzy score by the Vince Guaraldi Trio that quickly became part of the national lexicon. The golden anniversary of the television show, which focuses on the noncommercial aspects of the Christmas season, is being celebrated with several special events this month, following the November release of the big-screen Peanuts Movie, in which Charlie Brown declares, “I just need to know the secret for doing something great.” A Brooklyn staple for seven years, A Charlie Brown Christmas Live is moving from the Lyceum to Redwood Studios in Gowanus, being performed December 11-13 and 18-20 ($12), with adults Justin Tyler as Charlie Brown, Gillian Smith-Esposito as Lucy, Susan Forman and Lauren Orkus as Snoopy, and Alden Ford, Doug Aho, and Sean Bradley as Linus; the show is directed by Mollie Vogt-Welch, with music by Stephanie Sanders on keyboards and Jon Shaw on bass. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you can catch A Charlie Brown Christmas in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium on December 19 & 20 ($45-$80), with the big-screen projection accompanied by an inventive live musical score by the Rob Schwimmer Trio, followed by an audience sing-along of holiday tunes. Tickets include museum admission, so you can also check out the Met’s Christmas Tree and Neapolitan Baroque Crèche while you’re there.

Over at David Geffen Hall, the New York Philharmonic Principal Brass Quintet and the Canadian Brass join together again for the twentieth annual Holiday Brass concert on December 13 ($49-$69), consisting of tunes from A Charlie Brown Christmas as well as a Chanukah medley, Bach’s Bells, “Penny Lane,” “Joy to the World,” and other holiday songs, performed with the New York Philharmonic Percussionists. The festivities continue December 20 at the Carnegie Hall Family Holiday Concert, as music director and conductor Steven Reineke and the New York Pops play A Charlie Brown Christmas and sing-along favorites with the TADA! Youth Theater, Essential Voices USA, and members of the New York Theatre Ballet. But you don’t need any tickets to see Macy’s Herald Square Christmas windows, which depict six scenes, designed by Roya Sullivan, from the classic Charlie Brown Christmas show, with interactive elements that allow visitors to play Schroeder’s piano and to add their own character to the celebration. The windows will remain on view through January 4; you can see all the windows here.

THE HOLLYWOOD CLASSICS BEHIND WALKERS: MY WINNIPEG AND BRING ME THE HEAD OF TIM HORTON

Guy Maddin creates a unique and unusual docu-fantasia in MY WINNIPEG

MY WINNIPEG (Guy Maddin, 2007) & BRING ME THE HEAD OF TIM HORTON (Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson, 2015)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, December 12, $12, 2:00
Series runs through December 27
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

In 2007, Canadian auteur Guy Maddin presented his (maybe) semiautobiographical work My Winnipeg, an insanely brilliant homage to his native city, at the Tribeca Film Festival, where he had previously wowed crowds with his splendid cinematic installation Cowards Bend the Knee in 2003. This past September, Maddin (The Saddest Music in the World, Careful) was at the New York Film Festival, screening his latest feature, The Forbidden Room, along with the fabulously titled Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton, a short he made with regular collaborators Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson and which was shown on a loop for free for two days in the Elinor Bunin Munroe Amphitheater. My Winnipeg and Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton are being paired together December 12 at 2:00 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image series “The Hollywood Classics Behind Walkers,” held in conjunction with the exhibition “Walkers: Hollywood Afterlives in Art and Artifact,” which consists of painting, sculpture, photography, and video that incorporates the art form of cinema. In My Winnipeg, Maddin pays tribute to the long, bizarre history of the title Canadian province, which sits directly in the middle of North America, what Maddin refers to as the “heart of the heart of the continent.” Combining archival footage with re-created scenes, all of which look like faded newsreels and early, degraded prints, Maddin, in voice-over narration, tells of horses buried in ice with their heads sticking out, the Happyland amusement park, Ledge Man, the Hudson’s Bay Company, stampedes, spirit photography and seances, a beauty pageant for men, local scavenger hunts in which the winner gets a ticket out of town, and other strange elements; one of the many joys of the film is not knowing what is exactly true and what is invention, although there is more fact here than you might think. “Everything that happens in this city is a euphemism,” Maddin says, just to keep us guessing. He also gets personal in the film, which he calls a “docu-fantasia,” with many scenes focusing on his mother — or an actress playing his mother. A masterful meditation on memory, My Winnipeg is one of Maddin’s most accomplished, most accessible works, proving him to be the successor to such avant-garde filmmakers as Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel (Un Chien Andalou), Stan Brakhage (Dog Star Man), and Orson Welles (F for Fake).

Meanwhile, Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton, whose title references both Sam Peckinpah’s cult classic Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and hockey player and doughnut entrepreneur Tim Horton, who died in a drunk-driving car accident in 1974 while a member of the Buffalo Sabres, takes viewers behind the scenes of the making of Paul Gross’s 2015 Afghanistan war movie, Hyena Road. Of course, this is no standard DVD-extra documentary but instead an exploration of art, violence, money, hockey, and acting — Maddin gets to play a small role in Gross’s film — among other ideals, inspired by Evan Johnson’s “The Cuadecuc Manifesto,” which was derived from Pere Portabella’s Cuadecuc, vampir experimental film created from footage shot while Jess Franco was making his 1970 version of Count Dracula with Christopher Lee, Herbert Lom, and Klaus Kinski. Got that? Well, it doesn’t really matter, because as with all of Maddin’s films, it’s all about the experience, a melding of sight and sound as only he can deliver. Following My Winnipeg and Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton, the Museum of the Moving Image will be showing Maddin’s latest, The Forbidden Room; unfortunately, the director will not be able to attend that screening, as was originally announced. The series continues through December 27 with such major films as Chinatown, Psycho, The Wild Bunch, and The Last Picture Show, so Maddin is certainly in some pretty fine company.

NOBUHIKO OBAYASHI — A RETROSPECTIVE: SEVEN WEEKS

Nobuhiko Obayashi’s beautifully told tale, SEVEN WEEKS, concludes Japan Society retrospective this weekend

SEVEN WEEKS (NO NO NANANANOKA) (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 2014)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Sunday, December 6, $12, 7:00
Series continues through December 6
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

Japan Society’s two-weekend, ten-film series “Nobuhiko Obayashi: A Retrospective,” which has revealed the Japanese auteur to be so much more than just the director of the 1977 cult classic House, comes to a close December 6 at 7:00 with Obayashi’s latest, the 2014 epic family drama Seven Weeks. A tribute to Obayashi’s late friend and colleague Hyoji Suzuki, who started an independent film workshop in Ashibetsu in 1993 and died of pancreatic cancer four years later at the age of thirty-six, Seven Weeks was shot in and around that Hokkaido village over the course of five weeks. Ninety-two-year-old patriarch Mitsuo Suzuki (Toru Shinagawa), a local retired doctor who now runs the Starry Cultural Center gift shop (a nod to Hyoji Suzuki’s Hoshi no Furusato Ashibetsu Eiga Gakko, or Starry Beautiful Home Ashibetsu Film School), is on his deathbed, and various relatives are arriving to say goodbye and participate in the nanana no ka Buddhist ritual, in which they will hold memorials once a week for seven weeks following his death. The mourners include Mitsuo’s sister, Eiko (Tokie Hidari), grandchildren Fuyuki (Takehiro Murata), Haruhiko (Yutaka Matsuhige), Akito (Shunsuke Kubozuka), and Kanna (Saki Terashima), and great-granddaughter Kasane (Hirona Yamazaki), in addition to his nurse, Nobuko Shimizu (Takako Tokiwa). During the seven weeks, family members relive the past, uncovering surprising secrets about the young Mitsuo (Shusaku Uchida), his harmonica-playing friend Ono (Takao Ito), and the woman they both admire, Ayano (Yumi Adachi), as Obayashi weaves together past and present through flashbacks, the appearance of dead characters, and painting and poetry (several of the characters share a love of the poems of Nakahara Chuya).

But the film, shot in lush, fairy-tale-like colors by cinematographer Hisaki Mikimoto and featuring a sweeping score by Kôsuke Yamashita and a kind of Greek chorus embodied by the unusual Japanese band the Pascals, is not merely about the travails of one extended family; it is also very much about the rebuilding of Japanese society in the wake of WWII, the earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011, and the ensuing Fukushima nuclear disaster. In fact, all of the clocks and watches in Seven Weeks are perpetually stopped at 2:45 pm, the exact time the horrific 3/11 events began. Obayashi also investigates the Soviet invasion of Sakhalin Island in August 1945 and the abuse of Korean migrant workers in Japanese mines as he explores the complex issue of the meaning of home. Seven Weeks is a beautifully told tale of memory and loss, of art and war, a summing up not only of Obayashi’s career but of twentieth-century Japan, with plenty of the director’s unique trademark style. “How do I paint the world?” Mitsuo asks at one point, something Obayashi has achieved in this deeply involving and wonderfully mysterious film. Fortunately for all of us, the seventy-seven-year-old auteur is not quite done painting the world, already hard at work on his next picture, continuing a legacy that is at last being celebrated here in the West. The final weekend of “Nobuhiko Obayashi: A Retrospective” also includes 1988’s The Discarnates, 1989’s Beijing Watermelon, and 2004’s Reason.

MATTHEW BARNEY AND JONATHAN BEPLER: RIVER OF FUNDAMENT

Matthew Barney’s five-and-a-half-hour epic makes its Manhattan debut this weekend (photo by Hugo Glendinning)

RIVER OF FUNDAMENT (Matthew Barney & Jonathan Bepler, 2014)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
December 4-10, $14 per act, $40 series pass
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

In February 2014, I experienced the entirety of Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler’s fecal epic, River of Fundament, in one marathon evening at the BAM Harvey, coming away impressed, confused, exhausted, and in need of a long, hot shower. And now you can feel the same as the bizarrely mesmerizing and surreal five-and-a-half-hour adventure flows into the IFC Center for a one-week engagement. Fortunately, you have the choice of seeing the cinematic journey in three acts on different days, or you can just check them out back-to-back-to-back, depending on your general level of comfort for these kinds of things. To help you make sense of it, Barney will be at the IFC Center for a Q&A following the 7:20 screening of act three on December 6; of course, that also has the potential to, er, clog your mind even further.

RIVER OF FUNDAMENT is built around episodes in Los Angeles, Brooklyn, and Detroit (photo by Ivano Grasso)

“Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before,” Norman Mailer writes at the beginning of his 1983 novel, Ancient Evenings. “Is this the fear that holds the universe? Is pain the fundament? All the rivers veins of pain? The oceans my mind awash? I have a thirst like the heat of earth on fire. Mountains writhe. I see waves of flame. Washes, flashes, flashes, waves of flame.” New York-based visual artist Barney and Berlin-based composer and musician Bepler have transformed Mailer’s seven-hundred-page epic about death and rebirth in Egypt into quite the cinematic spectacle. In his five-part, seven-hour Cremaster Cycle, Barney explored the ascension and descension of the cremaster muscle, which determines sexual differentiation, with a cast that included Mailer as Harry Houdini and Barney as Gary Gilmore in a section inspired by Mailer’s book The Executioner’s Song while focusing on cars and petroleum jelly in others. River of Fundament begins with Mailer’s wake at an intricate reconstruction of his Brooklyn Heights home, with Mailer’s son John Buffalo Mailer playing his father’s spirit. The second act follows the reincarnation of Mailer (Milford Graves) as he is born in the River of Feces and meets medium Hathfertiti (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and a gold 1979 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am. The third act returns to Brooklyn, with Mailer’s next reincarnation played by a 2001 Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor and Ellen Burstyn taking over as Hathfertiti. The primary cast also features Paul Giamatti, Cremaster star Aimee Mullins, Elaine Stritch, Lila Downs, Chief Dave Beautiful Bald Eagle, Joan La Barbara, and Madyn G. Coakley, with a multitude of cameos by Dick Cavett, Luc Sante, Larry Holmes, Salman Rushdie, Lawrence Weiner, Fran Lebowitz, Marti Domination, James Toback, David Amram, and dozens of others as the myth of Isis, Osiris, Nephthys, Set, and Horus plays out as well.

Cars once again are featured prominently in epic new Matthew Barney film (photo by Ivano Grasso)

The action, much of which consists of filmed performance art presentations that were held in public spaces, moves from New York City to Los Angeles to Detroit as Egyptian mythology and ritual play out in unusual ways. Barney, whose multidisciplinary Cremaster exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2002-3 was one of the best of the decade, gave New Yorkers an advance sneak peek at the making of River of Fundament via the ”DJED” show at the Gladstone Gallery in the fall of 2011 and the wide-ranging “Subliming Vessel” at the Morgan Library in 2013. Not that they gave any real indication of what to expect, because with Barney, the only thing to expect is the unexpected. And even then, don’t expect to understand what is unfurling before you. Just know that once you take it all in, you will never be able to flush it out of your mind, where it will simmer and stew most likely for the rest of your natural life.

ITALIAN FILM, 21st-CENTURY STYLE — A TRIBUTE TO RAI CINEMA: GOOD MORNING, NIGHT

Marco Bellocchio reimagines kidnapping of Aldo Moro in GOOD MORNING, NIGHT

Marco Bellocchio reimagines kidnapping of Aldo Moro in suspenseful GOOD MORNING, NIGHT

GOOD MORNING, NIGHT (BUONGIORNO, NOTTE) (Marco Bellocchio, 2003)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Saturday, December 5, 8:00, and Wednesday, December 16, 4:00
Series runs December 4-18
Tickets: $12, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

Italian auteur Marco Bellocchio reimagines the kidnapping of Aldo Moro from the inside in Good Morning, Night, a taut, slow-paced drama that won the Little Golden Lion at the 2003 Venice Film Festival. Moro, a former Italian prime minister and president of the Christian Democratic Party, was boldly grabbed by members of the radical Red Brigades, who left a bloody mess in their wake. Bellocchio focuses on the three men and one woman who orchestrated the plot and kept Moro locked in a hidden room inside their large rented apartment. While Mariano (Luigi Lo Cascio), Ernesto (Pier Giorgio Bellocchio), and Primo (Giovanni Calcagno) take turns guarding Moro and Mariano spews Socialist rhetoric at him, Chiaras (Maya Sensa), who is Primo’s girlfriend but is pretending to be Ernesto’s wife as a cover, goes to work every day, buys supplies and newspapers, and dreams at night of Moro coming to her as a father figure. Chiaras is the moral conscience of the movie, and a complete invention on the part of Bellocchio, who has said, “I’m not interested in the factual truth.” Even so, much of the real story is still not known, and like the JFK assassination, there are lots of conspiracy theories out there about an event that shocked a nation. Pink Floyd fans get a bonus by Bellocchio’s powerful use of “The Great Gig in the Sky” and “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” Good Morning, Night is screening on December 5 and 16 as part of the MoMA series “Italian Film, 21st-Century Style: A Tribute to Rai Cinema,” a two-week retrospective that consists of ten films from the last fifteen years released by the Italian studio, including Ermanno Olmi’s Il Mestiere delle armi (The Profession of Arms), Gianni Amelio’s Le Chiavi di casa (The Keys to the House), Emanuele Crialese’s Terraferma, and Alice Rohrwacher’s Le Meraviglie (The Wonders).

ITALIAN FILM, 21st-CENTURY STYLE — A TRIBUTE TO RAI CINEMA: GOMORRA

Matteo Garrone’s Italian gangster epic looks at Camorra crime syndicate in Naples

GOMORRA (GOMORRAH) (Matteo Garrone, 2008)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Sunday, December 6, 3:30, and Tuesday, December 15, 7:00
Series runs December 4-18
Tickets: $12, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.ifcfilms.com

Winner of the Grand Prix at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, Gomorra is a violent, intimate look at the modern-day Camorra crime syndicate in Naples and Caserta. Based on the nonfiction novel by investigative journalist Roberto Saviano — who has been living under police protection since the fall of 2006 — Matteo Garrone’s epic follows five distinct yet interrelated stories set around a dilapidated concrete-block housing project, a sort of Godfather meets The Sopranos filtered through Italian Neo-realism. Pasquale (Salvatore Cantalupo) is a tailor who considers sharing his secrets with a Chinese sweatshop to make some much-needed extra cash. Roberto (Carmine Paternoster) is having second thoughts training under Franco (The Great Beauty’s Toni Servillo), who runs a toxic waste dumping business. Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato) has to deal with a delicate, difficult situation when Maria’s (Italian singing star Maria Nazionale) young son joins the secessionists, a rival gang. Marco (Marco Macor) and Ciro (Ciro Petrone) are loose cannons who keep messing with the wrong people. And Totò (Salvatore Abruzzese) is a thirteen-year-old boy who is helping out the Camorra against his mother’s wishes — and is soon faced with a life-changing decision. Beautifully shot by Marco Onorato and featuring a cast of primarily nonprofessional actors, Gomorra is a deeply involving crime drama, all the more frightening because it’s based on real, current situations. Gomorra is screening December 6 & 15 as part of the MoMA series “Italian Film, 21st-Century Style: A Tribute to Rai Cinema,” which kicks off with Garrone’s latest, Il Racconto dei racconti (Tale of Tales). The two-week retrospective consists of ten films from the last fifteen years released by the Italian studio, including Ermanno Olmi’s Il Mestiere delle armi (The Profession of Arms), Gianni Amelio’s Le Chiavi di casa (The Keys to the House), Emanuele Crialese’s Terraferma, and Alice Rohrwacher’s Le Meraviglie (The Wonders).