this week in film and television

MONTY PYTHON AT THE TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL

The five surviving Pythons will be at the Tribeca Film Festival celebrating the fortieth anniversary of MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL

The five surviving Pythons will be galloping into the Tribeca Film Festival celebrating the fortieth anniversary of MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL

Beacon Theatre
2124 Broadway at 75th St.
Friday, April 24, $70-$355 (on sale March 28 at 12 noon), 7:30
Other screenings April 25-26 (on sale March 31 for AmEx cardholders and April 6 to the general public)
212-465-6500
tribecafilm.com
www.beacontheatre.com

Tickets go on sale to the general public Saturday morning at 12 noon for one of the premier events of the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival: the fortieth anniversary screening of the 1975 classic Monty Python and the Holy Grail, taking place at the Beacon Theatre on April 24 — with John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin on hand to talk about the film, one of the most quotable comedies ever made. “The Pythons are looking forward very much to the Tribeca Film Festival and the chance to meet anyone who can remember why we made Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” Palin said in a statement. “All we know is that it was a documentary about coconuts that rather lost its way. If anyone at Tribeca can explain why we made it and didn’t call it Braveheart, then our visit to New York will not have been wasted.” The closing weekend of the fifteenth annual TFF will also feature Roger Graef and James Rogan’s 2014 documentary, Monty Python: The Meaning of Live, on April 24 at 3:30 at the SVA Theater, Monty Python’s Life of Brian on April 25 at 12:30 at Bow Tie Chelsea Cinemas, and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life on April 26 at 1:30 at Regal Cinemas Battery Park. (Tickets for those films, as well as the rest of the TFF, go on sale to American Express cardholders on March 31 and everyone else on April 6.)

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)
Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway at 63rd St., 212-757-2280
Angelika Film Center, 18 West Houston St. at Mercer St., 212-995-2570
Opens Friday, March 27
www.sonyclassics.com

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.

LA SAPIENZA

LA SAPIENZA feature glorious sights and sounds as a couple tries to rekindle their spark

LA SAPIENZA (THE SAPIENCE) (Eugène Green, 2014)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
March 27 – April 9
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

New York City-born French filmmaker Eugène Green equates humanity and architecture in the lush, rich film La Sapienza. Named for the concept of gaining wisdom as well as Italian architect Francesco Borromini’s seventeenth-century Roman Catholic Baroque church Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, the film follows an older couple who rediscover their personal and professional passion after meeting a young pair of siblings. Architect Alexandre Schmidt (Fabrizio Rongione) and his wife, sociologist Aliénor (Christelle Prot Landman), are walking through a park in Switzerland when they see a teenage girl (Arianna Nastro) nearly collapse into the arms of a slightly older boy (Ludovico Succio). It turns out that Lavinia is suffering from incapacitating dizzy spells and is cared for by her brother, Goffredo, who is interested in studying architecture. Aliénor becomes involved in Lavinia’s situation while Alexandre, an intense, cynical man, returns to the book he is writing on Borromini (who famously worked in the shadow of Bernini) and travels to Italy with Goffredo as the boy’s reluctant mentor. Green’s (Toutes les nuits, Le monde vivant) first digital feature opens with the glorious sounds of Claudio Monteverdi accompanying cinematographer Raphaël O’Byrne’s magisterial shots of statuary and architecture in Rome. The acting at the start, particularly Rongione’s, is purposefully stiff and mannered, cold and stonelike, but it warms up as the characters learn (or relearn) about the myriad possibilities life offers. Green, who also appears in the film as the grizzled Chaldean, uses the metaphor of Baroque architecture’s role in the Counter-Reformation as a symbol for Alexandre and Aliénor’s relationship, as they finally face long-held emotions and reconsider their future, all while Green lingers on magnificent structures.

TICKET ALERT: BUGS BUNNY AT THE SYMPHONY II

Twenty-fifth anniversary show (photo © 2012 by George Daugherty)

Who: New York Philharmonic, conductor George Daugherty, and special guest Whoopi Goldberg (May 15-16)
What: Bugs Bunny at the Symphony II
Where: Avery Fisher Hall, 10 Lincoln Center Plaza, Broadway between West 62nd & West 65th Sts.
When: May 14-16, $55–$145, 7:30 (plus 2:00 matinee on May 16)
Why: Tickets are going fast for the twenty-fifth anniversary of “Bugs Bunny at the Symphony,” in which the New York Philharmonic plays live scores to classic Warner Bros. cartoons projected behind the orchestra on a big screen. Among the Looney Tunes favorites, all featuring classical music, of course, are What’s Opera, Doc?, Rabbit of Seville, A Corny Concerto, and Rhapsody Rabbit. We learned everything we know about classical music from two sources, Merrie Melodies and Stanley Kubrick films, so we were thrilled when we saw “Bugs Bunny on Broadway” back in 1990, and now we’re even more thrilled that it’s coming back our way for four shows at Avery Fisher Hall May 14-16.

ART OFF THE WALL — CHITRA GANESH: EYES OF TIME

Chitra Ganesh, “Eyes of Time,” detail, mixed-media wall mural, 2015 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Brooklyn Museum
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Herstory Gallery, fourth floor
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Thursday, March 26, free with museum admission, 6:00-9:30
Exhibition continues through July 12
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org
www.chitraganesh.com
eyes of time online slideshow

In her exceptional new site-specific installation, “Eyes of Time,” in the Brooklyn Museum’s Herstory Gallery, multimedia artist Chitra Ganesh investigates female divinity, multiplicity, and power, inspired by the goddess Kali, one of the women honored with a place setting in Judy Chicago’s seminal work “The Dinner Party,” the centerpiece of the museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, home to the Herstory Gallery. Ganesh, a lifelong Brooklynite, supplements her wall sculpture with selections from the museum’s collection, comprising contemporary works by Kiki Smith, Shoichi Ida, and Barbara Jones-Hogu as well as a small seventeenth-century Indian bronze of a standing Kali and an ancient Egyptian bronze of a seated Sekhmet. “In mythic tales both Sekhmet and Kali are connected to blood, death, destruction, and protection, and to fierce animals such as lions and tigers,” Ganesh writes in a wall label. “These qualities contrast with characteristics typically idealized in women today and point to the formidable roles played by the ancient goddesses.” About Louise Bourgeois’s 1996 drypoint, “Eyes,” Ganesh adds, “The third eye, as seen on Kali, has often been associated with supernatural powers in Indian mythology and continues to appear in contemporary imagery. The act of gazing into numerous eyes might also recall the practice of darshan, a dialectical and spiritual way of looking that considers the object as both image and living being, providing an experience of seeing that informs South Asian culture.”

Those explanations also offer just the right way to approach “Eyes of Time,” a sprawling mural of three women that covers one wall of the gallery. At the left is a contemporary figure holding a jagged, starlike piece of the universe over one eye while the other eye looks directly at the viewer. In the middle is a figure based on Kali, the goddess of time, change, and destruction, who has six arms, three legs, three breasts, and a skirt of severed arms of different colors. Words emerge from her long hair, including “quicksand,” “rainbows,” and “knowing.” One hand has an eyeball in its palm, one holds a whip, while another wields a blood-dripping scythe with an eye on it. Instead of a head, on her neck is the Grand Central clock, without its hands. And on the right is a science-fiction woman made out of such machine parts as gears and speakers laid out in a kind of architectural rendering. All three women, representing the past, the present, and the future, have shiny jewels embedded into their being, while two rows of decorated flags hang above them. In some ways, it’s like the three figures have escaped from Ganesh’s comic book Tales of Amnesia, which is also on view, giving three-dimensional life to these superhero characters. “These narrative devices allude to the power of multiple forms of femininity that coexist within the same frame and, at times, within a single being, as well as to darker aspects of Kali,” Ganesh writes about her 2002 book. On March 26, the Brooklyn Museum’s next edition of “Art Off the Wall” will celebrate “Eyes of Time” with an evening of special activities, consisting of an artist and curator talk with Ganesh and Saisha Grayson, a zine library inspired by Tales of Amnesia, screenings of three of Ganesh’s short films (Rabbithole; What Remains; My dreams, my works must wait till after hell…), a movement workshop with Ajna Dance Company, and a Bhangra dance party with DJ Rekha.

STRANGER THAN FICTION: THE MUSES OF ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

Documentary delves into Isaac Bashevis Singer’s love of women and their work as his translators

THE MUSES OF BASHEVIS SINGER (Asaf Galay & Shaul Betser, 2014)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Tuesday, March 24, 8:00
212-924-7771
www.stfdocs.com
www.the-muses-of-bashevis-singer.com

Who ever thought that little old Yiddish mensch Isaac Bashevis Singer was such a horndog? Asaf Galay and Shaul Betser begin The Muses of Bashevis Singer, their light and playful documentary, with the following quote from the Nobel Prize-winning author: “In my younger days I used to dream about a harem full of women. Lately I’m dreaming of a harem full of translators. If those translators could be women in addition, this would be paradise on earth.” Well, it seems that Singer, who was born in Poland in 1902, emigrated to the United States in 1935, and died in Florida in 1991 at the age of eighty-eight, found that paradise, as Galay and Betser meet with a series of women who were among many hand-picked by Singer, the man who nearly singlehandedly preserved Yiddish literature in the twentieth century, to serve as his translators, and not necessarily because of their language skills. “There were certain women who were more than just translators to him. It happened quite often,” says his Swedish publisher, Dorothea Bromberg, who also talks about Alma, Singer’s wife of more than fifty years. “He loved her, I’m sure, in his own way,” she adds. “She was very jealous of him, and she was completely right.” Galay and Betser meet with translators Eve Fridman, Evelyn Torton Beck, Dvorah Telushkin, Marie-Pierre Bay, Duba Leibell, and Dr. Bilha Rubenstein as well as Singer biographers Florence Noiville and Janet Hadda, his granddaughters Hazel Karr and Merav Chen-Zamir, Yentl the Yeshiva Boy playwright Leah Napolin, and his longtime secretary and proofreader, Doba Gerber, who share intimate, surprising tales about the author of such books as The Family Moskat, The Magician of Lublin, Shosha, and Enemies, a Love Story and such short stories as “Gimpel the Fool,” “A Friend of Kafka,” and “Zlateh the Goat.”

The seventy-two-minute film, lifted by a bouncy, airy soundtrack by Jonathan Bar-Giora, also includes footage of Singer making speeches, appearing on interview programs, going to a Jewish deli, walking on the Coney Island boardwalk, and writing with pen on paper and on a typewriter with Yiddish characters. But as the title implies, The Muses of Bashevis Singer doesn’t depict him as a callow cad but as a determined writer — and father and husband — who just loved women, loved being surrounded by women, using them as inspiration for his marvelous stories that mixed fiction with reality. “Isaac was a very frisky old man,” says Leibell, who worked with Singer in his later years after he moved to Florida with Alma. “That’s to put it very mildly.” The Muses of Bashevis Singer concludes the IFC Center’s winter Stranger than Fiction series on March 24 and will be followed by a Q&A with the director.

ALBERT MAYSLES TRIBUTE AND MAYSLES DOCUMENTARY CENTER OPEN HOUSE

The life and career of Albert Maysles will be celebrated on March 22 at the Maysles Documentary Center

Maysles Documentary Center
343 Lenox Ave./Malcolm X Blvd. between 127th & 128th Sts.
Sunday, March 22, free with advance registration, 11:00 am – 11:00 pm
maysles.org

In the 1960s and ’70s, Albert Maysles, his brother, David, and Charlotte Zwerin changed the face of documentary filmmaking and cinéma vérité with such genre-redefining works as What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA, Salesman, Gimme Shelter, and Grey Gardens, breaking down the fourth wall as they photographed their subjects. “As a documentarian I happily place my fate and faith in reality,” Albert explained. “It is my caretaker, the provider of subjects, themes, experiences — all endowed with the power of truth and the romance of discovery. And the closer I adhere to reality the more honest and authentic my tales. After all, knowledge of the real world is exactly what we need to better understand and therefore possibly to love one another. It’s my way of making the world a better place.” David passed away in January 1987 at the age of fifty-five, Zwerin died in 2004 at seventy-two, and now Albert has left us, saying farewell on March 5 at the age of eighty-eight, having helped make the world a better place. Of course, his legacy lives on, in the works of so many other documentarians, from Errol Morris to Andrew Jarecki, as well as with the film center that bears his name, the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem. On Sunday, March 22, the MDC will host an all-day tribute to its legendary founder with an open house, screenings, and special introductions; admission is free with advance registration. The celebration begins at 11:00 with the 1965 short Meet Marlon Brando, 1964’s What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA, and a reception. Other programs include With Love from Truman and Salesman at 2:00, Ozawa and Muhammad and Larry at 5:00, and Running Fence, Cut Piece, Salvador Dali’s Fantastic Dream, and excerpts from Muhammad and Larry and Iris at 8:00. “Remember, as a documentarian you are an observer, an author but not a director, a discoverer, not a controller,” Maysles said in describing his craft. “Don’t worry that your presence with the camera will change things. Not if you’re confident you belong there and understand that in your favor is that of the two instincts, to disclose or to keep a secret, the stronger is to disclose.” He changed things indeed.