this week in film and television

EUPHORIA

Giancarlo Esposito plays a philosophical cabbie in Julian Rosefeldt’s Euphoria (photo by Nicholas Knight / courtesy of Park Avenue Armory)

EUPHORIA
Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
Daily through January 8, $18
www.armoryonpark.org

“The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed — for lack of a better word — is good,” Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) famously pronounced in Oliver Stone’s Oscar-nominated 1987 film, Wall Street. “Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed — you mark my words — will not only save Teldar Paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.”

Well, as it turns out, greed has not exactly saved America or the world, but is there still hope? German filmmaker Julian Rosefeldt explores that possibility in his beautifully rendered twenty-four-channel immersive installation, Euphoria, continuing at Park Avenue Armory through January 8. It arrives at an opportune moment, not only in the midst of a post-global-pandemic economic crisis but during the holiday season, when rampant consumerism dominates our everyday life.

In 2016, Rosefeldt presented Manifesto at the armory, a thirteen-channel film projected on screens placed throughout Wade Thompson Drill Hall, featuring Cate Blanchett as twelve different characters spouting cultural missives by artists and philosophers going back more than 150 years. One of the themes came from Jim Jarmusch: “Nothing is original.” While nearly all the dialogue in Euphoria is taken from another source, how it is incorporated into a 115-minute visual and aural feast is anything but derivative or uninventive. And it’s about a lot more than just the Benjamins.

Euphoria comprises six distinct scenes, each of which exists on its own in a loop; you can enter at any time, as the order doesn’t matter. The linking factor is the discussion of socioeconomics in the modern world. There are black fold floor chairs scattered around the space, but you can also walk around the installation. The main screen hangs at the center, where the six stories are told. Five smaller screens are at the same level in a circle, where drummers Terri Lyne Carrington, Peter Erskine, Yissy García, Eric Harland, and Antonio Sanchez occasionally pick up their sticks and play. Eighteen more screens surround the space, except for the entrance, on which 140 members of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus are projected, life-size; in the dark hall, it often looks like they are actually there, in person, singing or, when silent, standing more or less still, their slight swaying adding a dash of reality to the primary narrative, which delves into the fantastical. (The score is by Samy Moussa, with an additional composition by Cassie Kinoshi.)

Julian Rosefeldt’s twenty-four-channel installation surrounds viewers (photo by Nicholas Knight / courtesy of Park Avenue Armory)

On a cold winter night in New York City, a taxi driver played by Giancarlo Esposito, partially channeling his character from Jarmusch’s Night on Earth, including his “fresh” winter hat with earflaps, picks up a well-dressed man with shopping bags who is going to the Brooklyn Navy Yard; it’s not long before we realize Esposito is playing both roles. The cabbie does most of the talking, his dialogue made up of quotes from John Steinbeck, Noam Chomsky, Fareed Zakaria, G. K. Chesterton, JR, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and others, seamlessly woven together. “My momma always said: Too many people buy things they don’t need with money they don’t have to impress people who don’t care,” the cabbie says (Will Rogers). Passing by strange things happening on the street, the cabbie delivers lines that essentially sum up much of what Euphoria is about: “And then they see their idealism turn into realism, their realism into cynicism, their cynicism turn into apathy, their apathy into selfishness, their selfishness into greed and then they have babies, and they have hopes but they also have fears, so they create nests that become bunkers, they make their houses baby-safe and they buy baby car seats and organic apple juice and hire multilingual nannies and pay tuition to private schools out of love but also out of fear. What happened? You start by trying to create a new world and then you find yourself just wanting to add a bottle to your cellar, you see yourself aging and wonder if you’ve put enough away for that and suddenly you realize that you’re frightened of the years ahead of you. You never think you’ll become corrupt but time corrupts you, wears you down, wears you out. You get tired, you get old, you give up on your dreams. . . . You mind who you think you wanted to be” (Don Winslow).

The action moves next to a postapocalyptic ship graveyard where five white homeless men, Poet, Smartass, Randy, Keynes, and Sidekick, gather around a trash fire, discussing the “three great forces [that] rule the world: stupidity, fear, and greed” (Albert Einstein). Randy declares, “It seems to me that not doing what we love in the name of greed is just very poor management of our lives. I will tell you the secret to getting rich: Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful!” (Warren Buffett). Quotes from Machiavelli, Snoop Dog, Erich Fromm, Socrates, Adam Smith, Stephen King, Elizabeth Warren, and more are interwoven as the men pass around a bottle of rum, eat marshmallows, and burn a smartphone and, unbeknownst to them, a parade of animals in the background boards a large wooden ship, as if a new world is starting that the men will not be part of.

In a parcel delivery factory, three women (Virginia Newcomb, Ayesha Jordan, Kate Strong) work an assembly line, scanning and organizing packages while discussing how “things can only get worse” (Invisible Committee). They detail their struggles with overwhelming debt, long hours and low pay, racial injustice, motherhood, and misogyny and sexualization, sharing the words of Audre Lorde, Sojourner Truth, Ursula K. Le Guin, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Cardi B, and Frantz Fanon. “You sound like an archaeologist!” one of the women says to her conveyor-belt mate, who responds, “That’s right! I am an archaeologist. You wanna know why? ’Cause my life lies in fucking ruins.”

One of the scenes in Euphoria takes place in a surreal bank (photo by Nicholas Knight © Julian Rosefeldt / courtesy of Park Avenue Armory)

An elegant Kyiv bank turns into a surreal carnival in a scene that kicks off with a doorman (Yuriy Shepak) looking into the camera and saying, “It is a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money” (Albert Camus). A moment later he adds, “Money is like blood. It gives life if it flows. Money enlightens those who use it to open the flower of the world” (Alejandro Jodorowsky). Excerpts from Yuval Noah Harari, Michael Lewis, Matt Taibbi, Bertolt Brecht, George Carlin, Don DeLillo, and Karl Marx merge as a security guard (Nina Songa), a mother (Evgenia Muts), a homeless woman (Elena Aleksandrovich), and a cleaner (Corey Scott-Gilbert) go about their business, the bankers transforming into magicians, acrobats, and dancers. It’s a Busby Berkeley celebration in which money isn’t real, just another trick or performance. As the cleaner notes, “Money isn’t a material reality — it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind. So why does it succeed? Because people trust the figments of their collective imagination. Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted. Religion asks us to believe in something. Money only asks us to believe that other people believe in something” (Yuval Noah Harari).

In another vignette, six skate teens (Rocio Rodriguez-Inniss, Esther Odumade, Tia Murrell, Dora Zygouri, Asa Ali, and Luis Rosefeldt) come together in an abandoned bus terminal talk to about the future, debating quantitative vs. qualitative value, spouting lines from Arthur C. Clarke, Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare, Aldous Huxley, and John Maynard Keynes. “It’s considered sexy to accumulate property, money, stocks, cars. What a waste of dopamine and adrenaline if it’s all just about quantity, right?” (JR) one of the girls asks. “Right,” replies a second girl. “I mean, if a monkey hoarded more bananas than it could eat, while most of the other monkeys starved, scientists would study that monkey to figure out what the heck was wrong with it. When humans do it, we put them on the cover of Forbes” (Nathalie Robin Justice). One of the boys points out, “A brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian, is presented to us as ideal” (Alain Badiou), adding, “We humans want to compete with each other, to grow, to invent, to expand. Fair enough. But why not within an ethically defined framework, based on common shared values” (JR). As almost always, the younger generation believes they can change the world for the better, through education and the reestablishment of goals based on equality and what’s best for all, not competition that serves the few. “We need to think big. Our natural habitat has always been the future, and this terrain must be reclaimed” (Nick Srnicek/Alex Williams) a third girl says. But as a fourth girl points out, “No wonder the galaxies recede from us in every direction, at the speed of light. They are frightened. We humans are the terror of the universe” (Edward Abbey). Perhaps unsurprisingly, this section contains the most original dialogue, as the teenagers seek to discover what comes next for themselves and not just relying on existing theories.

My cycle concluded in a large supermarket, where a bold, beautiful, ever-threatening tiger (voiced by Blanchett) makes its way up and down the aisles of canned, boxed, and bottled food and drink. It warns us, “Of the world as it exists, it is not possible to be enough afraid (Theodor W. Adorno). History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce (Karl Marx). Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. But even knowing can’t save them. ’Cause what is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood (Cormac McCarthy).” With quotes from Thomas Hobbes, Terry Pratchett, A. S. Byatt, Marquis de Sade, and Theodor W. Adorno, the hungry, swaggering animal accuses humans of being short-sighted power-mongers, filled with hatred and violence, whose extinction would bring no harm to the planet; in fact it would be welcomed. But the tiger adds, “And the best at war, finally, are those who preach peace. Beware the preachers. Beware the knowers. Beware their love” (Charles Bukowski).

In his 2000 breakthrough hit, “Ride wit Me,” Nelly proclaimed, “Hey, must be the money!” In Euphoria, Rosefeldt zeroes in specifically on greed and its devastating cost on humanity. At the beginning of the bank scene, the doorman says, “For thousands of years, philosophers, thinkers, and prophets have besmirched money and called it the root of all evil,” quoting Hurari. But the full biblical quote from the apostle Paul in Timothy 6:10 actually puts it in a different perspective: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” Today, more than ever, with more of the planet’s wealth in very few hands, financial institutions are like houses of worship, evoked further by the celestial sounds of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus in the armory. Perhaps the security guard says it best when, quoting one of the wisest sages of the last fifty years, George Carlin, he says, “Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank and he can rob the world.”

GOING ALL THE WAY: THE DIRECTOR’S EDIT

Willard “Sonny” Burns (Jeremy Davies) often finds himself in the dark in Going All the Way: The Director’s Edit

GOING ALL THE WAY: THE DIRECTOR’S EDIT (Mark Pellington, 1997/2022)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, December 16
212-255-224
goingalltheway.oscilloscope.net
quadcinema.com

During the pandemic lockdown, filmmaker Mark Pellington found the original three-hour-plus cut of his 1997 debut, Going All the Way, a little-known, rarely shown coming-of-age tale with a fabulous young cast set in small-town Indianapolis in 1954. He and editor Leo Trombetta “were just bored in Covid,” so they decided to take another stab at the film, which had previously gone through several iterations nearly a quarter century ago, ranging from 98 to 112 to more than 180 minutes.

The project was mostly to just give them something to do, but soon they had trimmed the first 40 minutes, added 50 minutes of previously unused material and new, gentle voice-over narration by Trombetta, commissioned 50 minutes of new music from composer Pete Adams, and installed an ominous title sequence by Sergio Pinheiro that recalls David Lynch, with images of Main Street, rural America, Jesus, sexuality, and a bleeding razor. The result is a very different 126-minute film, darker, more introspective and character-driven, more attuned to Dan Wakefield’s 1970 bestselling autobiographical novel, which was adapted by the author himself. (Wakefield, who is now ninety, created the late-’70s television series James at 15 and appears as farmer #2 in Going All the Way.)

“I’ve always kinda been more of an outer-directed guy. Right?” Korean War veteran Tom “Gunner” Casselman (Ben Affleck) tells high school classmate Willard “Sonny” Burns (Jeremy Davies) at a bar. “And now, as time goes on, I’m kinda becoming more inner-directed, not giving a shit so much what the crowd thinks. You’ve always been kind of more of an inner-directed guy.” It’s a keen metaphor for the revised film.

Gunner is everybody’s all-American, a classically handsome high school sports star who came back from Korea with gleaming medals on his uniform. Sonny is the kid no one remembers, a wallflower who blends in with the background, a soldier and photographer who spent the war in public information in Kansas City. Gunner is a doer, while Sonny is a watcher, yet each of them wants to be more like the other, almost as if they are two sides of the same person, ego and id. In fact, the name of the high school paper that featured Sonny’s memorable picture of Gunner on the gridiron is named the Echo.

Sonny (Jeremy Davies) watches from behind as Gunner (Ben Affleck) and Marty (Rachel Weisz) stop by the club in Going All the Way

Both men live at home with their family. Gunner’s mother is a sexually attractive, outgoing divorcée who Gunner calls Nina (Lesley Ann Warren); the first time we see them together, it looks like they’re lovers. Sonny’s Bible-thumping mother, Alma (Jill Clayburgh), treats her boy like an innocent fawn unable to make his own decisions or know what’s best for him; Sonny’s father, Elwood (John Lordan), hardly ever speaks while always agreeing with his wife.

Gunner lives life minute to minute, ready to try just about anything since he was reawakened to so many possibilities during his time in Japan, especially if it involves women. When he is immediately taken by Marty Pilcher (Rachel Weisz), a Jewish woman interested in art and who wants to move to New York, Gunner goes with her to a museum, joined by Sonny, and Sonny’s sort-of girlfriend, Buddy Porter (Amy Locane), who is in love with him even though he gives her no reason to be. She has decided that she is going to marry him and start a family in her hometown, but Sonny is not so sure. He uses her, but she lives up to her name, being more of a friend (with benefits) who is willing to carry Sonny’s (heavy psychological) load.

When Gunner and Marty set up Sonny with the unfettered and liberated Gale Ann Thayer (Rose McGowan) at a fancy party, Sonny finally lets loose, but it comes with a price that makes him reconsider what path he wants to follow.

Filmed on location in Indianapolis in thirty days and now available in a 4K restoration opening December 16 at the Quad, Going All the Way: The Director’s Edit might have disappeared among the spate of 1990s coming-of-age movies (Dazed and Confused, Varsity Blues, This Boy’s Life, Rushmore), but it is now getting a much-deserved second chance in this reimagined update.

The cast is outstanding, with Affleck, in his first lead role, self-possessed and charming as Gunner, and Davies a bundle of uncomfortable nerves as Sonny, who often mutters unfinished sentences that can barely be heard. His constant jitteriness balances Affleck’s strong confidence. Cinematographer Bobby Bukowski often shoots Affleck with bright lighting, focusing on the upper half of his body, while Davies is often seen in darkness, shot from above to make him look small and insignificant. Clayburgh and Warren play two very different kinds of mothers who get to duke it out in one of the film’s best scenes. Rising stars Weisz, McGowan, Locane, and Nick Offerman (a bit part in his film debut) are a joy to watch.

Prior to Going All the Way, Pellington was primarily a director of music videos (U2, Public Enemy, Pearl Jam, Nine Inch Nails, Foo Fighters, Bruce Springsteen) and commercials. He has clearly learned a lot in the intervening years, helming such productions as Arlington Road, I Melt with You, and The Mothman Prophecies, and the new edit benefits from his experience, even if most of his films have not been met with critical acclaim. Going All the Way: The Director’s Edit also offers a lesson in how existing footage can be reconstructed into a more complex and intriguing narrative.

Pellington will be at the Quad for Q&As at the 7:00 show on Friday with Alex Ross Perry, 7:00 on Saturday with Bilge Ebiri, and 4:20 on Sunday with Dan Mecca.

ALL THAT BREATHES

All That Breathes explores the fate of black kites in India as representative of so much more

ALL THAT BREATHES (Shaunak Sen, 2022)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
212-255-224
quadcinema.com
www.allthatbreathes.com

Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes opens with a long shot of rats scurrying about a filthy New Delhi area, then follows a man carrying four boxes with holes in them into a dingy, crowded basement garage. One starts to rock and falls awkwardly to the floor. The man walks over and takes out an injured bird. As Mohammad Saud, Nadeem Shehzad, and Salik Rehman examine the injured creature, they speak of a possible nuclear war between India and Pakistan.

“What’ll happen to the birds if there’s a nuclear war?” Rehman asks. “We’ll all die. Where will they go?”

A moment later, a young boy searches for a bullet, an announcement from the street advises, “We don’t want any harm to any public property,” and a black kite, a bird of prey that migrates to New Delhi every year, grips a small branch and then accusingly stares directly into the camera. Later street announcements declare, “This is a fight for empathy and unity! The Constitution has to be saved!” regarding the treatment of Islamic citizens.

For several decades, Indian Muslim brothers Saud and Shehzad have been rescuing and healing kites that have fallen from the sky, victim to pollution and the cotton threads of kites that slice their wings. “When we got our first kite . . . I’d stay up at night staring at it,” Shehzad says in voiceover as a lone kite soars in the air, the moon at its left. “It looked like a furious reptile from another planet. It’s said that feeding kites earns ‘sawab’ [religious credit]. When they eat the meat you offer, they eat away your difficulties. And their hunger is insatiable.”

When the brothers were teenage bodybuilders, they encountered their first injured kite. A bird hospital refused to help because the species is not vegetarian, so they used their own knowledge of flesh, muscles, and tendons to repair it. They’ve been rescuing and repairing hurt birds in their highly unsanitary quarters ever since.

Amid the social unrest and their legitimate fears of being turned into refugees because of their religion, Saud and Shehzad continue to fix the birds, as if fixing themselves as they worry about losing their freedom. Over one dinner they discuss with their families what they might do if the government kicks them out of the country. Meanwhile, the brothers are desperate to get a grant to keep their Wildlife Rescue operating.

“I’ve devoted my entire life to this. But this doesn’t feel enough to me,” Shehzad explains. “Things are getting from bad to worse here. Birds are plummeting from the sky. Delhi is a gaping wound. And we’re a tiny Band-Aid on it.”

Cinematographer Ben Bernhard focuses in on nature, from an icy river to an owl to dozens and dozens of kites filling the sky, set to a gentle yet ominous score by Roger Goula. Director and producer Sen (Cities of Sleep) is not just making a film about kites in India; he is accusing the world as a whole of misusing resources in ways that threaten the existence of such living creatures as kites and damage the planet’s ecological system.

“Man is the loneliest animal,” Saud says.

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary (World Cinema) at Sundance and the L’OEil d’or for Best Documentary at Cannes, All That Breathes is now playing at the Quad.

THE TREASURE OF HIS YOUTH: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF PAOLO DI PAOLO

Paolo di Paolo’s photograph of Pier Paolo Pasolini at Monte dei Cocci in 1960 is one of many highlighted in Bruce Weber documentary

THE TREASURE OF HIS YOUTH: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF PAOLO DI PAOLO (Bruce Weber, 2022)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, December 9
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

“The mystery of Paolo di Paolo to me is that he was able to give up photography, something he once had such passion for,” documentarian Bruce Weber says at the beginning of the fabulous The Treasure of His Youth: The Photographs of Paolo di Paolo, a warm and inviting film about one of the greatest photographers you’ve never heard of.

In 1954, Italian philosopher Paolo di Paolo saw a Leica III camera in a shop window and, at the spur of the moment, decided to buy it. That led to fourteen extraordinary years during which the self-taught artist took pictures for Il Mondo and Il Tempo, documenting, primarily in black-and-white, postwar Italy as well as the country’s burgeoning film industry. He was not about glitz and glamour; he captured such figures as Luchino Visconti, Anna Magnani, Ezra Pound, Simone Signoret, Marcello Mastroianni, Charlotte Rampling, Alberto Moravia, Sofia Loren, Giorgio Di Chirico, and others in private moments and glorying in bursts of freedom. He went on a road trip with Pier Paolo Pasolini for a magazine story in which the director would write the words and di Paolo would supply the images. His photos of the society debut of eighteen-year-old Princess Pallavincini are poignant and beautiful, nothing like standard publicity shots.

Paolo di Paolo’s relationship with the camera is revealed in lovely documentary (photo courtesy Little Bear Films)

Then, in 1968, just as suddenly as he picked up the camera, he put it away, frustrated by the growing paparazzi culture and television journalism. A few years ago, Weber and his wife went into a small gallery in Rome where Weber, who has had a “love affair” with Rome since he was ten, discovered magnificent photos of many of his favorite Italian film stars. The gallery owner, Giuseppe Casetti, told him that the pictures were by an aristocratic gentleman he had bumped into at flea markets and who one day came into the bookstore where he was working and gave him one for free, knowing he was a collector. Casetti wanted to know who had taken the photo; “I was once a photographer,” di Paolo told him unassumingly.

That set Weber off on a search to find out everything he could about di Paolo, who is now ninety-seven. Even his daughter, Silvia di Paolo, had no knowledge of her father’s past as a photographer until she found nearly a quarter of a million negatives in the basement of the family home and began organizing them about twenty years ago. Paolo had never spoken of this part of his life; he wrote books on philosophy, was the official historian of the Carabinieri, and restored antique sports cars, but his artistic career was an enigma even though it was when he met his wife, his former assistant.

The father of the bride watches the young couple as they head down a country road (photo by Paolo di Paolo)

Weber follows di Paolo as he meets with photographer Tony Vaccaro, film producer Marina Cigona, and his longtime friend (but not related) Antonio do Paola, visits his childhood home in Larino, is interviewed by the young son of Vogue art director Luca Stoppini, and attends his first-ever retrospective exhibition (“Il Mondo Perduto” at the Maxxi Museum in Rome). And he picks up the camera again, taking photos at a Valentino fashion show.

Cinematographer Theodore Stanley evokes di Paolo’s unpretentious style as he photographs the aristocratic gentleman walking up a narrow cobblestoned street, his cane in his right hand, an umbrella in his left over his head, and driving one of his sports cars. Editor and cowriter Antonio Sánchez intercuts hundreds and hundreds of di Paolo’s photos, several of which are discussed in the film: a spectacular shot of Pasolini at Monte dei Cocci, the director in the foreground, the famous cross atop a hill in the background; Visconti in a chair, fanning himself; a scene in which a father, hands in his pocket, watches his daughter and new son-in-law walking away on an empty country road. There are also clips from such classic films as Rocco and His Brothers, Accatone, Rome Open City, Marriage Italian Style, and 8½. It’s all accompanied by John Leftwich’s epic score.

As Cigona tells di Paolo about having ended his flourishing photography career, “People said, ‘Why did you do that? You were quite famous.’” It was never about the fame for di Paolo, but now the secret is out.

“For me, every object is a miracle,” Pasolini says in an archival interview. In The Treasure of His Youth, Weber (Chop Suey, Let’s Get Lost) treats every moment with di Paolo and his photographs as a miracle. So will you.

BABY DOLL: ACTORS STUDIO SCREENING AND DISCUSSION WITH CARROLL BAKER

Carroll Baker will be at the Actors Studio to discuss the making of Baby Doll

Who: Carroll Baker, Katherine Wallach, Foster Hirsch
What: Film screening and discussion
Where: The Actors Studio, 432 West Forty-Fourth St.
When: Thursday, December 8, free with RSVP, 7:00
Why: The Actors Studio continues celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary with a fabulous special event, a free screening of Elia Kazan’s 1956 drama Baby Doll, followed by a discussion with the one and only Carroll Baker, who portrayed the title character. Adapted by Tennessee Williams from his one-act play 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, the film is set in the Mississippi Delta, where Baby Doll Meighan is about to turn twenty and finally have relations with her significantly older husband, Archie Lee (Karl Malden), much to the chagrin of Archie’s chief rival, Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach). The steamy movie, which popularized the babydoll nightgown, received four Oscar nominations, including Baker for Best Actress, Mildred Dunnock for Best Supporting Actress, Williams for Best Adapted Screenplay, and Boris Kaufman for Best Black-and-White Cinematography.

The ninety-one-year-old Baker, who also appeared in such works as The Carpetbaggers, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Andy Warhol’s Bad, Star 80, and Ironweed, will be at the Actors Studio on December 8 for the screening and to talk about Baby Doll with Katherine Wallach, the daughter of Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, moderated by Brooklyn College film professor Foster Hirsch. Admission is free with advance RSVP.

TANTURA

Teddy Katz listens to damning audiotapes about a 1948 massacre in Tantura

TANTURA (Alon Schwarz, 2022)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, December 2
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

There’s a deeply disturbing theme that runs through Alon Schwarz’s shocking, must-see documentary, Tantura, about one specific incident during what Palestinians refer to as Al Nakba, “the Catastrophe” that took place during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

In the late 1990s, a graduate student named Teddy Katz researched a possible Israeli army massacre that occurred in the Palestinian village of Tantura. When filmmaker Schwarz interviews members of Israel’s Alexandroni Brigade about it, they smile and laugh as they either flat-out deny that such war crimes happened or basically tell Schwarz, so what if it did?

“In the War of Independence, we knew one simple thing: It’s either me or them,” Amitzur Cohen says. “What would I tell [my wife]? That I was a murderer?” he easily admits with a laugh. “If you killed, you did a good thing,” Hanoch Amit says with a smile. Henio-Tzvi Ben Moshe, head of the Alexandroni Veteran’s Association, lets out a disturbing laugh when he declares, “We’re done with Teddy Katz.”

In the late 1990s, for his master’s thesis at the University of Haifa, Katz interviewed 135 people about the massacre, compiling 140 hours of recordings about the Tantura atrocities, centered around the alleged cold-blooded murder of some two hundred Palestinians whose bodies were then dumped into a mass grave. He received a high grade on the paper, but it was soon submerged in controversy, resulting in a defamation lawsuit and claims that it was all a lie.

“You can take the tapes and listen to them, but if you want to make a movie out of it, be careful, because you’ll be hunted down like I was,” Katz tells Schwarz.

But that warning doesn’t deter Schwarz, who speaks with Alexandroni Brigade vets — who are now in their nineties — university professors, engineers, and Arabs who survived the massacre as he puts together what actually happened at Tantura and how Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion began the cover-up, which is still going on.

“My whole life I thought, and I still think, that the root of the disaster, including the part . . . that can be called the contamination, is 1948,” explains Katz, who was named after Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. “To this day the vast majority of what happened in 1948 is not only hushed up but also destroyed.”

Schwarz intercuts archival footage from the war — in which hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were demolished and some three quarters of a million refugees fled their homes — with scenes from a staged propaganda reenactment and clips of Ben-Gurion and the establishment of the State of Israel. As the evidence mounts, so does the refusal to acknowledge the Catastrophe.

“It’s forbidden to tell. I’m not going to talk about it . . . because . . . it could cause a huge scandal. I don’t want to talk about it,” brigade vet Yossef Diamant says. “That’s it. But it happened; what can you do? It happened. . . . [Katz] told the truth,” he adds with a dismissive laugh.

Casually sitting in a chair outside with a woman on either side of him, Mulik Sternberg proudly says, “The Arabs are an evil, cruel, vindictive enemy, but we were better, in battle. Always. . . . Of course we killed them. We killed them without remorse.” He is clearly unafraid of any possible repercussions.

Mustafa Masri, who lives in Fureidis, where many of the Tantura survivors were relocated, describes seeing the bodies of his murdered father and brother piled on a cart of victims. Professor Yoav Gelber comes right out and says, “I don’t believe witnesses.”

Professor Ilan Pappe puts it all in perspective when he says, “I think the self-image of Israel as a moral society is something I haven’t seen anywhere else in the world. How important it is to be exceptional. We are the Chosen People. This is part of the Israeli self-identification as a very superior moral people. . . . I think it’s very hard for Israelis to admit that they commit war crimes.”

Schwarz is an Israeli-born Jew who worked as a high-tech software entrepreneur before turning to documentaries, making Narco Cultura and Aida’s Secrets with his brother Shaul. Alon, who considers himself “a member of the moderate left side of Israel’s political system,” initially set out to make a film about young human rights activists who are trying to end the 1967 occupation and are labeled by many as traitors — much as Katz is. Schwarz stumbled on Katz’s dilemma by accident.

Documentary seeks to uncover the truth of what happened in Tantura in May 1948

Schwarz is no mere fly on the wall in the film but is actively investigating numerous aspects of the case, putting himself in the story. Tantura is reminiscent of Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012 The Act of Killing and 2014 follow-up, The Look of Silence, as the director confronts the perpetrators of the 1965–66 genocide in Indonesia, who are proud of what they did. It also recalls the 1968 Mỹ Lai massacre led by US Lt. William Calley Jr. in Vietnam.

Katz, who has had three strokes and uses a motorized scooter to get around, is determined to not give up until justice wins out, despite all that’s happened to his career and his family. “You feel like the country is against you,” his wife, Ruth, tells Schwarz. But none of it might matter in the long run.

“What we remember are the good memories,” says Drora Varblovsky, one of four remaining original residents of Kibbutz Nachsholim, which was started in June 1948 on the former site of Tantura.

“Yes, exactly. I have only good memories,” Tereza Carmi adds. “Because I’m fed up with remembering bad things.”

Tantura opens at IFC on December 2, with Schwarz on hand for Q&As after the 7:50 shows on December 2 and 3.

PARIS, TEXAS

Harry Dean Stanton gives a staggering performance as a lost soul in Paris, Texas

PARIS, TEXAS (Wim Wenders, 1984)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
November 25 – December 1
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

Winner of both the Palme d’Or and the Critics Prize at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas is a stirring and provocative road movie about the dissolution of the American family and the death of the American dream. Written by Sam Shepard and adapted by L. M. Kit Carson, the two-and-a-half-hour film opens with a haggard man (Harry Dean Stanton) wandering through a vast, deserted landscape. A close-up of him in his red hat, seen against blue skies and white clouds, evokes the American flag. (Later shots show him looking up at a flag flapping in the breeze, as well as a graffiti depiction of the Statue of Liberty.) After he collapses in a bar in the middle of nowhere, he is soon discovered to be Travis Henderson, a husband and father who has been missing for four years. His brother, Walt (Dean Stockwell), a successful L.A. billboard designer, comes to take him home, but Travis, remaining silent, keeps walking away. He eventually reveals that he is trying to get to Paris, Texas, where he has purchased a plot of land in the desert, but he avoids discussing his past and why he walked out on his wife, Jane (Nastassja Kinski), and son, Hunter (Hunter Carson, the son of L. M. Kit Carson and Karen Black), who is being raised by Walt and his wife, Anne (Aurore Clément). An odd man who is afraid of flying, has a penchant for arranging shoes, and falls asleep at key moments, Travis sets out with Hunter to find Jane and make something out of his lost life.

Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) and Hunter (Hunter Carson) bond while searching for Jane in Wim Wenders road movie

Longtime character actor Stanton (Repo Man, Wise Blood) is brilliant as Travis, his long, craggy face and sad, puppy-dog eyes conveying his troubled soul and buried emotions, his slow, careful gait awash in loneliness and desperation. The scenes between Travis and Jane are a master class in acting and storytelling; Stanton and Kinski (Tess, Cat People) will break your heart over and over again as they face the hardest of truths. Wenders and regular cinematographer Robby Müller use a one-way mirror to absolutely stunning effect in these scenes about what is hidden and what is revealed in a relationship. Wenders had previously made the Road Movie Trilogy of Alice in the Cities, The Wrong Move, and Kings of the Road, which also dealt with difficult family issues, but Paris, Texas takes things to another level. Ry Cooder’s gorgeous slide-guitar soundtrack is like a requiem for the American dream, now a wasteland of emptiness. (Cooder would later make Buena Vista Social Club with Wenders. Another interesting connection is that Wenders’s assistant director was Allison Anders, who would go on to write and direct the indie hit Gas Food Lodging.) A uniquely told family drama, Paris, Texas is rich with deft touches and subtle details, all encapsulated in the final shot. (Don’t miss what it says on that highway billboard.)