this week in film and television

SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION

Pianist Seymour Bernstein speaks with director Ethan Hawke at Steinway & Sons on Sixth Ave. (photo courtesy of Ramsey Fendall)

SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION (Ethan Hawke, 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, March 13
www.ifcfilms.com

No, with Seymour: An Introduction, Ethan Hawke hasn’t managed the nearly impossible, filming an adaptation of the J. D. Salinger story about a young man who commits suicide. Instead, Hawke uses the title for his beautifully touching, life-affirming portrait of octogenarian composer and musician Seymour Bernstein. An extraordinary pianist, the Newark-born Bernstein started playing when he was three, began giving lessons when he was fifteen, and, when he turned fifty, decided to stop performing recitals despite great critical success, in order to concentrate on teaching and composing and to avoid his stage fright and the negative aspects of commercial fame. After meeting at a dinner party, Hawke and Bernstein hit it off and agreed to collaborate on the project, which was filmed over the course of two years. Hawke, in his first documentary and third feature as director (following Chelsea Walls and The Hottest State), shows Bernstein holding master classes in auditoriums, teaching in his cramped New York City apartment, talking in a café with former student and current New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman, and selecting just the right piano for a recital Hawke convinces him to give at the Steinway & Sons showroom on West Fifty-Seventh St.; in addition, Hawke speaks with such other Bernstein friends as writer and scholar Andrew Harvey, pianist and lecturer Joseph Smith, and musician and songwriter Kimball Gallagher.

Documentary focuses on master pianist and composer Seymour Bernstein’s love of life and music (photo courtesy of Ramsey Fendall)

Seymour: An Introduction depicts Bernstein as a truly gentle, generous soul who always looks for the positive in people and situations, a perpetual smile on his face. The film focuses on his relationship with the piano more so than his personal life; although he discusses his childhood and his time in the military, he never mentions companions or family outside of his parents. For Bernstein and Hawke, it’s all about the music. “When I was around the age of fifteen, I remember that I became aware that when my practicing went well, everything else in life seemed to be harmonized by that. When my practicing didn’t go well, I was out of sorts with people, with my parents,” Bernstein says near the beginning of the documentary. “So I concluded that the real essence of who we are resides in our talent, in whatever talent there is.” And Bernstein’s talent is extraordinary, a joy to behold, as is his love of life. The endlessly charming and inspiring Seymour: An Introduction opens March 13 at Lincoln Plaza and the IFC Center; the now eighty-seven-year-old Bernstein will be at IFC to talk about the film at the 6:15 and 8:15 shows on Friday night and will be joined by Hawke at the 6:15 and 8:15 shows on Saturday and the 4:15 and 6:15 screenings on Sunday.

REELABILITIES: NY DISABILITIES FILM FESTIVAL

Rory Culkin will be among the special guests at the ReelAbilities film festival, discussing his starring role in GABRIEL

Multiple venues
March 12-18, free – $50 (most film screenings $12-$13)
newyork.reelabilities.org

The seventh annual ReelAbilities film festival will feature more than two dozen programs, focusing on “promoting awareness and appreciation of the lives, stories, and artistic expressions of people with different disabilities.” This year’s festival, running March 12-18, will take place at more than three dozen locations in all five boroughs in addition to Westchester and Long Island. The Finishers, Nils Tavernier’s drama about a teenager with cerebral palsy who is convinced by his father that the two should compete together in an Ironman triathlon in France, is the opening-night selection, with a gala screening at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, while the closing-night film is Carlo Zoratti’s The Special Need, about a twenty-nine-year-old autistic man who is determined to lose his virginity, being shown March 18 at the JCC in Manhattan and followed by a reception. Among the other films are Adam Kahan’s The Case of the Three Sided Dream, a documentary about blind and paralyzed jazzman Rahsaan Roland Kirk; Troy Kotsur’s mockumentary No Ordinary Hero: The SuperDeafy Movie; Richard Kane’s Jon Imber’s Left Hand, which tells the story of the artist who had to switch the hand he paints with because of ALS; and Lou Howe’s Gabriel, which stars Rory Culkin as a teenager dealing with mental illness. (Many of the screenings will be followed by discussions and Q&As with the filmmakers, actors, protagonists, and health professionals.) There will also be such special events as “(In)Visible,” a conversation between blind Michigan Supreme Court justice Richard Bernstein and Jason’s Connections cofounder Jason Harris; a multimedia exhibit at the JCC in Manhattan by the Jack and Shirley Silver Center for Special Needs; the ReelAbilities Comedy Night at the JCC with Anita Hollander, Mary Archbold, Pat Shay, Shannon DeVido, and David Harrell; and a Shabbat Dinner celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, with film screenings and a panel discussion with historian Warren Shaw, Justice Bernstein, photographer Rick Guidotti, and others, moderated by Lawrence Carter-Long.

MoMA PRESENTS: BENEDIKT ERLINGSSON’S OF HORSES AND MEN

Human nature is explored through the eyes of horses in wildly entertaining Icelandic tale

OF HORSES AND MEN (HROSS Í OSS) (Benedikt Erlingsson, 2013)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
March 11-17
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
hrosss.is/the-film

Iceland’s entry for the 2013 Academy Awards and winner of the 2014 Nordic Council Film Prize, Benedikt Erlingsson’s black comedy, Of Horses and Men, takes an absurdist look at the relationship between humans and horses, incorporating love, sex, pain, responsibility, friendship, religion, and death in darkly comic and heart-rending ways. In a tight-knit community spread across a sweeping rural landscape in Iceland, horses are far more plentiful than people. One morning, Kolbeinn (Ingvar E. Sigurdsson) goes for a ride aboard his gorgeous white mare as men, women, and children come outside to watch him pass by like it’s a parade. But a shocking, unexpected encounter with Solveig’s (Charlotte Bøving) black stallion sets into motion a series of interconnected vignettes, each successive one featuring a minor character from a previous scene. Lust, land disputes, gender distinction, and other agreements and disagreements lead to either tragedy or joy, but, of course, this being Iceland, the former is far more prevalent, especially as more and more Brennivin (Black Death) and other drink is consumed. Writer-director Erlingsson’s debut feature is gorgeously photographed by Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson, whose camera moves lovingly over the green fields and mountainous valleys, treating the horses like Hollywood sirens, zooming in on their eyes to show the reflection of the people who seek to control them, equating the basic animal instincts of both species. The horses in the film are no mere props; Erlingsson, who grew up in a theatrical family and has directed numerous stage productions (in addition to owning a horse, whom he called his “life companion,” for thirty years until recently having to put her down), treats the animals like characters in their own right, revealing their, dare we say, humanity. Produced by Icelandic cinema legend Friðrik Þór Friðriksson (Children of Nature, Mamma Gógó), Of Horses and Men is a dark, wildly entertaining treatise on human nature among a rather quirky and unusual equestrian set. The film is being shown March 11-17 at the Museum of Modern Art as part of the ongoing MoMA Presents series.

DCTV PRESENTS STRAY DOG

Ron “Stray Dog” Hall takes his wife, and viewers, on a marvelous ride into the heart of America in Debra Granik’s charming documentary

STRAY DOG (Debra Granik, 2014)
DCTV (Downtown Community Television Center)
87 Lafayette St.
Wednesday, March 11, $10, 7:00
212-966-4510
www.dctvny.org
www.straydogthemovie.com

Shortly after meeting Ron “Stray Dog” Hall at the Biker Church in Branson, Missouri, writer-director Debra Granik (Down to the Bone) cast the Vietnam vet as Thump Milton in her second feature, the Oscar-nominated Winter’s Bone. Upon learning more about him, she soon decided that he would be a great subject for a documentary, so she took to the road, following him across the country in the engaging and revealing Stray Dog. Nearly always dressed in black, including his treasured leather jacket covered in medals and patches — when he puts it in a suitcase for a trip, it’s a ritual like he’s folding the American flag — Hall is a wonderfully grizzled old man with a fluffy white beard. At home, he is learning Spanish online so he can communicate better with his new wife, Alicia, a Mexican immigrant, and her two sons (who still live across the border). He visits with his teenage granddaughter, who is making some questionable decisions about her future. In Missouri, he owns and operates the At Ease RV Park, where he gives breaks to fellow vets who can’t always afford to pay the rent. And when he goes on the road, participating in the Run for the Wall, joining up with thousands of other bikers heading for the annual service at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, he stops along the way at other ceremonies honoring soldiers who have gone missing, are POWs, or were killed in action in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other wars.

Hall is a gregarious, gentle man who people instantly flock to and gather around — a scene in which two of his cats sit on each of his knees is absolutely heartwarming — but he is also haunted by some of the things he did in Vietnam, suffering from nightmares that sometimes have him screaming out loud while sleeping in bed. And he wears one of his mottoes right on his arm: “Never Forgive Never Forget.” At one point he sits comfortably on a couch and says, “Just kind of being free, don’t hurt nobody, do what you want to do — a nice thing, ain’t it? You know, I’d rather live as a free man for a year than a slave for twenty.” Granik simply follows Hall as he experiences life with his surprisingly refreshing point of view; no one ever turns to the camera to make any confessions, and no talking heads are brought on board to evaluate what we’re seeing. Granik just lets this beautiful piece of Americana unfold at its own pace while also touching on such hot-button topics as immigration reform, gun control, the economic crisis, and PTSD, making no judgments as we follow the captivating exploits of a man who is part Buddha, part Santa, and all patriot. Stray Dog, which made its New York premiere this past October at the 52nd New York Film Festival, will be screening March 11 at 7:00 at DCTV, followed by a Q&A with director Granik, editor and producer Tory Stewart, and cinematographer Eric Phillips-Horst.

WIM WENDERS: THE SALT OF THE EARTH

Sebastião Salgado is shown photographing the planet — and trying to save the world — in THE SALT OF THE EARTH

THE SALT OF THE EARTH (Wim Wenders & Juliano Ribero Salgado, 2014)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Saturday, March 7, 7:45
Series runs March 2-17
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.sonyclassics.com
www.moma.org

Over the course of his storied five-decade career, German-born auteur and photographer Wim Wenders has alternated between making documentaries, primarily about other artists (Pina Bausch, Yasujirō Ozu, the Buena Vista Social Club) and fiction films, often unique takes on the road movie in which photographs play a key role (Paris, Texas; Alice in the Cities, Kings of the Road). In his latest work, Wenders has found one subject that combines his many interests, as he follows the remarkable adventures of Brazilian photographer and environmentalist Sebastião Salgado, who has traveled the world taking stunning pictures of the land and native peoples. In The Salt of the Earth, which was nominated for a Best Documentary Feature Oscar and won the Un Certain Regard special jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival and the César at France’s national film awards, Wenders teams up with Salgado’s son, filmmaker Juliano Ribero Salgado (Suzana; Nauru, an Island Adrift), as they accompany Salgado on his journeys and talk about his work, which consists predominantly of black-and-white photographs in such social justice series as “Workers” and “Migrations” and his most recent, the nature-themed“Genesis,” which was just shown at ICP. In the documentary, Salgado is shown rolling around on a shore to get a picture of a polar bear in the Arctic Circle, heading down into the mines of Brazil, meeting the Yali in Papua New Guinea, and sitting on a mountain, contemplating the future of the planet.

Sebastião Salgado talks about his life and work in Oscar-nominated documentary directed by his son and Wim Wenders

Salgado is not only photographing parts of the world devoid of technological modernity but is also involved, with his wife and curator, Lélia Wanick Salgado, in returning to nature, having planted more than two million trees to rebuild part of the Atlantic Forest on his family’s land in Brazil and starting Instituto Terra, a nonprofit community organization dedicated to restoring the ecosystem. “A photographer is literally somebody drawing with light, a man writing and rewriting the world with light and shadows,” Wenders narrates in the film. “Little did I know that I was going to discover much more than just a photographer.” Using a semitransparent mirror, Wenders also conducts interviews with Salgado, who is seen in front of a screen, looking at his photographs while discussing them. Other times the only thing on camera is Salgado’s bald head against a black background, as he peers into the camera to share his tale, including his relationship with his wife and children. “If you put many photographers in one place, they’ll all take very different pictures,” Salgado says. “Each one forms their way of seeing according to their history.” As The Salt of the Earth ably displays, Salgado has a fascinating history. The Salt of the Earth is being shown at MoMA on March 7 at 7:45 as part of a two-plus-week Wenders retrospective in advance of the film’s March 27 theatrical release; Wenders, who just received the Golden Bear for lifetime achievement at the Berlin Film Festival, and Juliano Ribero Salgado, whose next film will be a psychological thriller, will introduce the work and participate in a postscreening discussion. The series continues through March 17 with such other Wenders films as The American Friend, Wings of Desire, Until the End of the World, Tokyo-Ga, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, and other well-known gems and rare early shorts, with Wenders at the museum for Q&As and introductions at all screenings through March 7.

SEE IT BIG! HIGH AND WIDE: HIGH AND LOW

A group of men try to find kidnappers in Akira Kurosawa’s tense noir / police procedural

HIGH AND LOW (TENGOKU TO JIGOKU) (Akira Kurosawa, 1963)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, March 7, $12, 4:30
Series runs March 6-13
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
www.reverseshot.org

On the verge of being forced out of the company he has dedicated his life to, National Shoes executive Kingo Gondo’s (Toshirō Mifune) life is thrown into further disarray when kidnappers claim to have taken his son, Jun (Toshio Egi), and are demanding a huge ransom for his safe return. But when Gondo discovers that they have mistakenly grabbed Shinichi (Masahiko Shimazu), the son of his chauffeur, Aoki (Yutaka Sada), he at first refuses to pay. But at the insistence of his wife (Kyogo Kagawa), the begging of Aoki, and the advice of police inspector Taguchi (Kenjiro Ishiyama), he reconsiders his decision, setting in motion a riveting police procedural that is filled with tense emotion. Loosely based on Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novel King’s Ransom, Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, photographed by longtime Kurosawa cinematographer Asakazu Nakai, is divided into two primary sections: The first half takes place in Gondo’s luxury home, orchestrated like a stage play as the characters are developed and the plan takes hold. The second part of the film follows the police, under the leadership of Chief Detective Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai), as they hit the streets of the seedier side of Yokohama in search of the kidnappers. Known in Japan as Tengoku to Jigoku, which translates as Heaven and Hell, High and Low is an expert noir, a subtle masterpiece that tackles numerous socioeconomic and cultural issues as Gondo weighs the fate of his business against the fate of a small child; it all manages to feel as fresh and relevant today as it probably did back in the ’60s.

Kingo Gondo (Toshirō Mifune) has some tough decisions to make in HIGH AND LOW

High and Low is screening March 7 at 4:30 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image series “See It Big! High and Wide,” which runs March 6-13 in conjunction with the Reverse Shot online symposium “Take Five: Reverse Shot in Space.” “High and Low is a particularly emphatic example of Kurosawa’s attention to spatial continuity over the course of an entire film,” Ben Parker writes on Reverse Shot. “The title announces one spatial organization, the vertical juxtaposition of prosperous legality — symbolized by the hilltop estate of shoe executive Kingo Gondo — and the miasmic squalor and slinking resentment of the urban lower depths. But the very look of the film tells a different story. High and Low was shot using the TohoScope process, drastically widening the frame for an aspect ratio of 2.35:1. However much the social and moral themes of the film are posed along the vertical axis . . . the images and compositions are constrained to the horizontal. Ultimately, Kurosawa is attempting to undo the vertical binary of postwar Japanese society. This ‘leveling,’ however, is not as simple as filming in wide screen. Rather, the visual theme of the film culminates in its hard-won conclusion. In the last scene, Kurosawa arrives at a very different leveling of social space than that imagined by the diseased resentment of his villain.” The eight-day festival also includes such films as Jacques Tati’s Playtime, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, George Stevens’s Shane, and Elem Klimo’s Come and See.

AT THE TOP OF THE PYRAMID

AT THE TOP OF THE PYRAMID (Lawrence Jordan, 2014)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
March 4-10
310-630-7563
www.anthologyfilmarchives.org

It’s hard to figure out the new teen flick At the Top of the Pyramid. Is it a campy parody of the high school coming-of-age movie? An homage? A serious take on the genre? Just when you think you might have it figured out, the appearance of Steve Guttenberg only adds to the confusion. (And hey, isn’t that other dude Dean Cain?) Oh, and what’s the deal with it screening at Anthology Film Archives, home to cutting-edge avant-garde and independent cinema? (It turns out that the production company rented a theater at Anthology; it’s not part of their regular curatorial programming, and you won’t find it listed on the official calendar.) And finally, why is it so difficult to find an official website or social media presence? The main site seems to be a Twitter page with thirty followers that has been silent since September 2013. Anyway, At the Top of the Pyramid stars Elle McLemore, who originated the roles of Heather McNamara in the off-Broadway Heathers the Musical and Eva in Bring It On: The Musical on Broadway, as Jamie Parker, a cheerleader in Centreville, Virginia, dealing with a terrible fall and the tragic death of her father (Cain). She is in a perennial battle with villainous fellow cheerleader Diana (Jessica Luza), has a viciously dedicated coach (Vanessa Vander Pluym), and has a strong relationship with her caring mother (Kathleen Randazzo). The poorly edited film features hip-hop montage scenes and an overriding, often just plain silly PG sensibility, but then it comes along with such gems as the locker-room declaration, “She’s all neighbor, but no hood.” So yes, from March 4 to 10, as film enthusiasts file into Anthology to see “Avant-Garde Cinema from Ex-Yugoslavia, 1950s-80s,” “Screenwriters and the Blacklist: Before, During, and After — Part 3: Post-Blacklist,” and Essential Cinema works by Stan Brakhage, a whole different crew will be there to see a heartfelt movie about high school cheerleaders. “Is cheerleading the only thing?” Jamie asks at one point. “It’s the most important thing . . . to a cheerleader,” her coach responds.