this week in film and television

LINCOLN CENTER OUT OF DOORS: A CELEBRATION OF THE LIFE OF GEOFFREY HOLDER

The life of Geoffrey Holder will be celebrated at special free program at Lincoln Center

CARMEN & GEOFFREY (Linda Atkinson & Nick Doob, 2006)
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th St. between Amsterdam & Columbus Aves.
Saturday, August 1, free, 1:00
firstrunfeatures.com
lcoutofdoors.org

Carmen & Geoffrey is an endearing look at Carmen de Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder’s lifelong love affair with dance — and each other. The New Orleans-born de Lavallade studied with Lester Horton and went to high school with Alvin Ailey, whom she brought to his first dance class. Best known as a pitchman for 7UP (the “uncola”) and playing the intriguing Baron Samedi in Live and Let Die, Trinidadian Holder was a larger-than-life gentle giant who was a dancer, choreographer, composer, costume designer, actor, stage director, writer, photographer, painter, and just about anything else he wanted to be. The two met when they both were cast in Truman Capote and Harold Arlen’s Broadway show House of Flowers in 1954, with Holder instantly falling in love with de Lavallade; they remained together until Holder’s death this past October at the age of eighty-four. Directors Linda Atkinson and Nick Doob combine amazing archival footage — of Eartha Kitt, Josephine Baker, Ulysses Dove, de Lavallade dancing with Ailey, and other splendid moments — with contemporary rehearsal scenes, dance performances, and interviews with such stalwarts as dance critic Jennifer Dunning, former Alvin Ailey artistic director Judith Jamison, and choreographer Joe Layton (watch out for his eyebrows), along with family members and Gus Solomons jr, who still works with de Lavallade, and Dudley Williams, who just died last month. The film was made on an extremely low budget, and it shows, but it is filled with such glorious footage that you’ll get over that quickly. Carmen & Geoffrey, along with additional rare archival footage, is screening August 1 as part of the free Lincoln Center Out of Doors program “A Celebration of the Life of Geoffrey Holder” and will be preceded by the panel discussion “The Life and Work of Geoffrey Holder” with Doob and Atkinson, moderated by Leo Holder, Geoffrey and de Lavallade’s son. Fans should also check out the new exhibition “The Genius of Geoffrey Holder,” on view through August 29 at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

SUMMER OF MUSIC: ZIGGY STARDUST AND THE SPIDERS FROM MARS

ZIGGY STARDUST concert film will have a special free screening in Morningside Park on July 27, along with a look-a-like contest

Who: D. A. Pennebaker, David Bowie fans and wannabes
What: Outdoor screening of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (D. A. Pennebaker, 1973), introduced by the director, preceded by Night of 1000 Bowies’ Dance Party and Look-a-Like Contest with DJ Cosmo Baker
When: Monday, July 27, free, 6:30
Where: Morningside Park, 113th St. & Morningside Dr.
Why: A few weeks ago, a young woman we work with had no idea who Ziggy Stardust was. Well, she’ll know all about the David Bowie alter ego if she attends what should be a wild night July 27 in Morningside Park, which begins with a dance party and Bowie look-alike contest, followed by a screening of Pennebaker’s 1973 film, with Pennebaker on hand to talk about the work, which documented the July 3, 1973, performance of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars at the Hammersmith Odeon in London. Bowie’s record, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, came during a particularly fruitful period, right in between Hunky Dory and Aladdin Sane. The soundtrack features such Bowie greats as “Moonage Daydream,” “Space Oddity,” “Cracked Actor,” “Changes,” “Suffragette City,” and “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide” as well as the Bowie-penned Mott the Hoople hit “All the Young Dudes” and covers of the Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together” and the Velvet Underground’s “White Light/White Heat.” The evening is presented by Maysles Cinema and Reel Harlem: The Historic Harlem Parks Film Festival.

FILMS ON THE GREEN: LA COLLECTIONNEUSE

Néstor Almendros shot the beautiful LA COLLECTIONNEUSE, both his and director Eric Rohmer’s first feature film in color

SIX MORAL TALES: LA COLLECTIONNEUSE (Eric Rohmer, 1967)
Transmitter Park
2 Greenpoint Ave.
Friday, July 31, free, 8:30
frenchculture.org

“Razor blades are words,” art critic Alain Jouffroy tells painter Daniel Pommereulle (Daniel Pommereulle) in one of the prologues at the start of La Collectionneuse, the fourth film in French master Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales (falling between My Night at Maud’s and Claire’s Knee). Words might have the ability to cut, but they don’t seem to have much impact on the three people at the center of the film, which offers a sort of alternate take on François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. Needing a break from his supposedly strenuous life, gallerist Adrien (Patrick Bauchau, who also appeared in La Carrière de Suzanne, Rohmer’s second morality tale) decides to vacation at the isolated St. Tropez summer home of the never-seen Rodolphe. Daniel is also at the house, along with Haydée (Haydée Politoff), a beautiful young woman who spends much of the film in a bikini and being taken out by a different guy nearly every night. Adrien decides that she is a “collector” of men, and the three needle one another as they discuss life and love, sex and morality, beauty and ugliness. Adrien might claim to want to have nothing to do with Haydée, but he keeps spending more and more time with her, even though he never stops criticizing her lifestyle. He even uses her as a pawn when trying to get an art collector named Sam (played by former New York Times film critic Eugene Archer under the pseudonym Seymour Hertzberg) to invest in his gallery. While everybody else in the film pretty much knows what they want, Adrien, who purports to understand life better than all of them, is a sad, lost soul, unable to get past his high-and-mighty attitude. Rohmer crafted the roles of Daniel and Haydée specifically for Pommereulle and Politoff, who improvised much of their dialogue; Bauchau opted not to take that route, making for a fascinating relationship among the three very different people. La Collectionneuse is beautifully shot in 35mm by Néstor Almendros, the bright colors of the characters’ clothing mixing splendidly with the countryside and ocean while offering a striking visual counterpoint to the constant ennui dripping off the screen. His camera especially loves Politoff, regularly exploring her body inch by inch. The film is both Rohmer’s and Almendros’s first color feature; Almendros would go on to make more films with the director, as well as with Truffaut, even after coming to Hollywood and shooting such films as Days of Heaven, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Sophie’s Choice. Winner of a Silver Bear Extraordinary Jury Prize at the 1967 Berlinale, La Collectionneuse is screening July 31 in Transmitter Park as part of the annual Films on the Green series, which concludes September 10 with Joann Sfar and Antoine Delesvaux’s The Rabbi’s Cat at Columbia University’s Low Library.

TRUE CRIME — HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER

MIchael Rooker stars as a troubled murderer in HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER

HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER (John McNaughton, 1986)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Thursday, July 30, 10:15
Series continues through August 5
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

More than twenty-five years ago, when director John McNaughton (Mad Dog and Glory, Wild Things) was asked by executive producers Malik B. and Waleed B. Ali to make a low-budget horror film, he and cowriter Richard Fire decided to base their tale on the exploits of serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, whose story McNaughton had just seen on 20/20. The result was this creepy, dark, well-paced effort starring Michael Rooker as Henry, a brooding, casual serial killer who can’t quite remember how he murdered his mother. Henry lives in suburban Chicago with ex-con Otis (Tom Towles), whose sexy young sister, Becky (Tracy Arnold), comes to stay with them to get away from her abusive husband. As the relationship among the three of them grows more and more complicated, Henry continues to kill people — and get away with it. The opening tableau of some of Henry’s murder victims — the actual killings aren’t shown in the beginning — is beautifully done, although it also fetishizes violence against women, which is extremely disturbing. (Several of the victims are played by the same woman, Mary Demas, in different wigs.) Henry, which was not released until 1989 because of its graphic content, was nominated for six Independent Spirit Awards in 1990, and Rooker was named Best Actor at the Seattle International Film Festival. The film is screening July 30 as part of Film Forum’s “True Crime” series, which continues through August 5 with such other ripped-from-the-headlines tales as Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdou, Alain Resnais’s Stavisky, Leonard Kastle’s The Honeymoon Killers, and a double features of Barbet Schroeder’s Reversal of Fortune and Peter Medak’s The Krays.

THE OUTRAGEOUS SOPHIE TUCKER

The life and career of Sophie Tucker, seen here with longtime pianist Ted Shapiro, is celebrated in new documentary

THE OUTRAGEOUS SOPHIE TUCKER (William Gazecki, 2015)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, July 24
212-924-3363
www.cinemavillage.com
www.sophietucker.com

It’s about time the story of Sophie Tucker gets told. Unfortunately, William Gazecki’s The Outrageous Sophie Tucker is not quite the telling we’ve been waiting for. “She is the most underrated jazz singer that ever lived,” Tony Bennett says in the documentary about the bigger-than-life Tucker. “She was a great jazz singer.” Born Sonya Kalish on Christmas Day in 1886, Tucker was determined to become a star, and she ended up leaving her mark in vaudeville, on radio and television, and in films as an actress, singer, and comedian. But mostly, the woman known affectionately as “the Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” was a major mensch, cavorting with presidents and fans, keeping track of almost everyone she ever met, doing her own promotion, and living life exactly as she wanted to. The Jewish, bisexual Tucker hobnobbed with world leaders, Al Capone, Ed Sullivan, and J. Edgar Hoover (who once asked her for one of her dresses), among many others, and saw her name in lights on theater marquees across the country. However, although the film features some wonderful archival audio and visual footage and photographs of Tucker — singing such songs as “My Yiddishe Momme,” “Some of These Days,” and “Nobody Loves a Fat Girl” and appearing in the films Broadway Melody of 1938 and Gay Love — it never really gets to the heart of who she was; instead, it’s more about producers Susan and Lloyd Ecker, who, after cashing out of a successful internet company, became obsessed with Tucker, meticulously cataloging her more than four hundred scrapbooks and beginning a biographical trilogy with I Am Sophie Tucker: A Fictional Memoir.

The Oscar-nominated Gazecki (WACO: The Rules of Engagement, Reckless Indifference) includes interviews with Bennett, Carol Channing, Michael Feinstein, Shecky Greene, Bruce Vilanch, and Barbara Walters (whose father hired Tucker to regularly play his Latin Quarter nightclub), and there are brief remembrances over the closing credits from Chubby Checker, Joe Franklin, Paul Anka, Connie Stevens, and lesser-known names, but everything else is seen through the eyes of the Eckers, making it feel more like a vanity project / overly personal labor of love than a comprehensive look at the great Tucker. And there’s just not enough film footage of Tucker in action; to make up for some of that lack, Gazecki uses animation to bring some of the photos to life, which is even sillier than it sounds. It’s still a blast learning about Tucker, watching her joke around with Jimmy Durante and her longtime pianist Ted Shapiro, following her unhappy relationship with her son, but this documentary barely brushes the surface of what appears to be a much bigger, far more exciting and fascinating story. The Outrageous Sophie Tucker opens July 24 at Cinema Village and will also have a three-day engagement at the JCC in Manhattan July 27-29 as part of the Cinematters series, with all four screenings followed by a Q&A with the film’s producers.

PHOENIX

Nelly Lenz (Nina Hoss) tries to recapture her past in Christian Petzold’s PHOENIX

PHOENIX (Christian Petzold, 2014)
IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at Third St., 212-924-7771
Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway between 62nd & 63rd Sts., 212-757-2280
Opens Friday, July 24
www.ifcfilms.com

Christian Petzold’s Phoenix is a mesmerizing noir set in 1945 Berlin, where an Auschwitz survivor tries to reestablish her identity, but going home turns into a strange, painful, and dangerous journey. Nina Hoss is riveting as Nelly Lenz, a nightclub singer who is the only member of her family to have made it out of the war alive. Reentering Germany from Switzerland, she seems like a ghost or a mummy, her face swathed in bandages after having been severely disfigured by a gunshot wound. Wealthy enough to afford special facial reconstruction surgery, she is offered the chance to look like anyone she wants; the doctor gently suggests an entirely new appearance would be best, but she defiantly demands her own face back. Cared for by a companion, Lene Winter (Nina Kunzendorf), a fellow Jew who helps Holocaust survivors and wants to move to Palestine with her, Nelly seems psychologically frozen, tentative and frightened of the future. Instead of looking forward, she decides to go back to her non-Jewish husband, Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), now called Johannes. He has disowned his past so thoroughly that he doesn’t recognize Nelly as his wife, returned from the concentration camp, instead believing her to be a survivor who resembles her just enough to enable him to cash in on Nelly’s inheritance. As he grooms her to walk and talk like Nelly, reminiscent of what Jimmy Stewart does to Kim Novak in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, she begins finding out things about him that are deeply troubling, including the nightmarish possibility that he might have been the one who betrayed her to the Nazis.

Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld) doesn’t realize what’s right in front of him in gripping post-WWII noir

Tense and unnerving, Phoenix was inspired by Alexander Kluge’s An Experiment in Love, Hubert Monteilhet’s Return from the Ashes, Harun Farocki’s “Switched Women,” and oral histories from the Shoah Foundation. (Farocki, who passed away in July 2014, collaborated with Petzold on the screenplay.) Hoss and Zehrfeld, who previously worked together in Petzold’s gripping 2012 psychological thriller, Barbara, have an appropriately uneasy chemistry, keeping things off balance as former lovers who pursue an unusual courtship, he unwilling to acknowledge what’s right in front of him, she desperate to be recognized for who she was, and is. It’s a kind of eerie cat-and-mouse game, with more than a touch of Stockholm Syndrome, that intelligently examines a fascinating German amnesia about the war and its victims on a very personal scale. Kunzendorf (Scene of the Crime, Years of Love) is excellent as Lene, a forward-thinking woman who wants to start a new life with Nelly yet is unable to drag her away from her obsession with Johnny, while Zehrfeld (Finsterworld) has just the right amount of trepidation as Johnny pursues his selfish goal. But Hoss, in her sixth film with Petzold (Jerichow, Something to Remind Me), is simply extraordinary, her every movement utterly captivating, portraying complex emotions with remarkable skill. And the ending is simply brilliant, unforgettable. Once it gets past a few minor incongruities, Phoenix rises high, a spellbinding story of a twisted relationship in 1945 Germany that calls upon ancient myth, modern psychology, a nation’s guilt, and love and longing for the past to evoke universal themes — while posing some very difficult questions for everyone.

ANDREI TARKOVSKY, SCULPTING IN TIME: IVAN’S CHILDHOOD

A twelve-year-old boy (Nikolai Burlyayev) looks through dark shadows in IVAN’S CHILDHOOD

IVAN’S CHILDHOOD (MY NAME IS IVAN) (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
Museum of Arts & Design
2 Columbus Circle at 58th St. & Eighth Ave.
Friday, July 24, $10, 7:00
Series continues Friday nights through August 28
212-299-7777
madmuseum.org

In his 1986 book Sculpting in Time, Soviet auteur Andrei Tarkovsky wrote, “I have to admit that before the appearance of my first full-length work, Ivan’s Childhood, I did not feel that I was a director, nor did the cinema have any inkling of my existence.” That was certainly not the case after the film was released, as it won the Golden Lion at Venice, earned the praises of Jean-Paul Sartre, and went on to have a profound impact on global cinema. Based on a 1957 short story by Vladimir Bogomolov, Ivan’s Childhood is a magnificent tale of a fearless twelve-year-old boy (Nikolai Burlyayev) who spies for the Soviets during World War II. But for all of his outward toughness, he is still a child who dreams of another, safer life, wrapped in the welcoming arms of his dead mother (Irma Raush, Tarkovsky’s first wife). Shot in black-and-white by Vadim Yusov, the film opens with Ivan standing behind a large spiderweb, as if being captured in this fateful world is inevitable. The smiling, clean Ivan admires flora and fauna as he floats through the air, but when he comes back to the ground, he sees torn roots that remind him of the family he’s lost to the war and is eventually woken up from this dream and finds himself in the middle of a vast, burned-out landscape littered with death. He ultimately meets up with Capt. Kholin (Valentin Zubkov), Lt. Galtsev (Yevgeni Zharikov), Cpl. Katasonov (Stepan Krylov), and Lt. Col. Gryaznov (Nikolai Grinko) in a bunker, where the men decide that it is best for Ivan to go to the state military academy instead of continuing his dangerous reconnaissance missions. But Ivan, whose face is no longer clean but will seemingly be dirty forever, insists that he belongs with them, fighting the Germans. Of course, war is no place for a child, but there is no child quite like Ivan.

IVAN’S CHILDHOOD features breathtaking shots of life during WWII

The first full-length masterpiece of Tarkovsky’s short but brilliant career — he made seven films, in addition to the wonderful short The Steamroller and the Violin, which he wrote with Andrei Konchalovsky, before dying of cancer in 1986 at the age of fifty-four — Ivan’s Childhood is filled with unforgettable shots and poignant vignettes that establish the horrors of war and its effects on the Soviet Union. At one point, Ivan runs away and encounters an old man (Dmitri Milyutenko) pining for his wife as he cowers behind a rickety door in the open air, where his house used to be. In one of the film’s most famous and influential scenes, Capt. Kholin pursues a nurse, Masha (Valentina Malyavina), through a field of white birch trees; he ultimately catches and kisses her, holding her over a trench, his feet on either side of the narrow ditch, her feet dangling in the air, the birches rising in the distance behind him, a breathtaking image that is as ominous as it is beautiful. Later, Ivan feels trapped in a dark room; holding a flashlight and a knife, he rings an alarm bell, then cowers in tears, shown in silhouette, as bombings begin. Soon he is dreaming of happily sharing an apple with a young girl in the rain, the background shown in negative, the symbolism evoking potential tragedy as the girl grows increasingly sadder. Ivan might represent the future of the Soviet Union, but he is experiencing a childhood that no one should, surrounded by death and doom and devastation, his fate inevitable. All four of his dreams involve water, a metaphor for life, but he is drowning in memories (based on Tarkovsky’s own) that do him no good anymore. Tarkovsky made Ivan’s Childhood right out of film school, adapting a screenplay written by Mikhail Papava and working with a tight budget and deadline. Yet he, composer Vyacheslav Ovchinikov, set designer Evgeny Chemyayev, and Yusov were able to produce a spectacular film, a deeply psychological exploration of the end of innocence in the midst of war. “To be honest, in making my first film I had another objective: to establish whether or not I had it in me to be a director,” Tarkovsky wrote in Sculpting in Time. “In order to come to a definite conclusion I left the reins slack, as it were. I tried not to hold myself back. If the film turns out well, I thought, then I’ll have the right to work in the cinema. Ivan’s Childhood was therefore specially important. It was my qualifying examination.” It was also an unqualified success, leading to one of the great, albeit too brief, careers in cinema.

Ivan’s Childhood is screening July 24 at 7:00 as part of the the Museum of Arts & Design film series “Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time,” which runs Friday nights through August 28 and includes all seven of Tarkovsky’s masterpieces (Solaris, Stalker, Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, The Mirror, Nostalghia, The Sacrifice) before concluding with the behind-the-scenes documentary Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky was a superior craftsman whose cinematic oeuvre is filled with poetry and wonder, mystery and self-examination, exploring life and death, the past, the present, and the future, incorporating mesmerizing sound and visuals in telling complex stories like one else before or since.