this week in film and television

VERTIGO

James Stewart and Kim Novak get caught up in a murder mystery in VERTIGO

VERTIGO (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
October 24-30; back by popular demand through November 18
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

Alfred Hitchcock was perhaps never so fetishistic as in his 1958 psychological thriller, Vertigo. Based on Boileau-Narcejac’s 1954 novel, D’entre les morts, the film delves deep into the nature of fear and obsession. Jimmy Stewart stars as John “Scottie” Ferguson, a police detective who retires after his acrophobia leads to the death of a fellow cop. An old college classmate, wealthy businessman Gavin Elster (Tom Holmore), asks Scottie to look into his wife’s odd behavior; Elster believes that Madeleine (Kim Novak) is being inhabited by the spirit of Carlotta Valdes, her great-grandmother, a woman who committed suicide in her mid-twenties, the same age that Madeleine is now. Scottie follows Madeleine as she goes to Carlotta’s grave, visits a portrait of her in a local museum, and jumps into San Francisco Bay. Scottie rescues her, brings her to his house, and starts falling in love with her. But on a visit to Mission San Juan Bautista, tragedy strikes when Scottie can’t get to the top of the tower because of his vertigo. After a stint in a sanatorium, he wanders the streets of San Francisco where he and Madeleine had fallen in love, as if hoping to see a ghost — and when he indeed finds a woman who reminds him of Madeleine, a young woman named Judy Barton (Novak), he can’t help but try to turn her into his lost love, with tragedy waiting in the wings once again.

Scottie experiences quite a nightmare in Alfred Hitchcock classic

Vertigo is a twisted tale of sexual obsession, much of it filmed in San Francisco, making the City by the Bay a character all its own as Scottie travels down Lombard St., takes Madeleine to Muir Woods, stops by Ernie’s, and saves Madeleine under the Golden Gate Bridge. The color scheme is almost shocking, with bright, bold blues, reds, and especially greens dominating scenes. Hitchcock, of course, famously had a thing for blondes, so it’s hard not to think of Stewart as his surrogate when Scottie insists that Judy dye her hair blonde. Color is also central to Scottie’s psychedelic nightmare (designed by artist John Ferren), a Spirographic journey through his mind and down into a grave. Cinematographer Robert Burks’s use of the dolly zoom, in which the camera moves on a dolly in the opposite direction of the zoom, keeps viewers sitting on the edge of their seats, adding to the fierce tension, along with Bernard Herrmann’s frightening score. Despite their age difference, there is pure magic between Stewart, forty-nine, and Novak, who was twenty-four. (Stewart and Novak next made Bell, Book, and Candle as part of the deal to let Novak work for Paramount while under contract to Columbia.) The production was fraught with problems: The screenplay went through Maxwell Anderson, Alec Coppel, and finally Samuel A. Taylor; shooting was delayed by Hitchcock’s health and vacations taken by Stewart and Novak; a pregnant Vera Miles was replaced by Novak; Muir Matheson conducted the score in Europe, instead of Herrmann in Hollywood, because of a musicians’ strike; associate producer Herbert Coleman reshot one scene using the wrong lens; Hitchcock had to have a bell tower built atop Mission San Juan Bautista after a fire destroyed its steeple; and the studio fought for a lame alternate ending (which was filmed). Perhaps all those difficulties, in the end, helped make Vertigo the classic it is today, gaining in stature over the decades, from mixed reviews when it opened to a controversial restoration in 1996 to being named the best film of all time in Sight & Sound’s 2012 poll to the latest digital restoration that is playing at Film Forum October 24-30, a great way to get ready for Halloween. (And don’t be late, as even the opening credit sequence is beautifully creepy.)

FORCE MAJEURE

A close-knit Swedish family is about to face a serious crisis in Ruben Östlund’s FORCE MAJEURE

FORCE MAJEURE (Ruben Östlund, 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, October 24
www.magpictures.com

Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure is one of the best films you’ll ever hear. Not that Fredrik Wenzel’s photography of a lovely Savoie ski resort and Ola Fløttum’s bold, classical-based score aren’t stunning in their own right, but Kjetil Mørk, Rune Van Deurs, and Jesper Miller’s sound design makes every boot crunching on the snow, every buzzing electric toothbrush, every ski lift going up a mountain, every explosion setting off a controlled avalanche a character unto itself, heightening the tension (and black comedy) of this dark satire about a family dealing with a crisis. On the first day of their five-day French Alps vacation, workaholic Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke) and his wife, Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli), are enjoying lunch on an outdoor veranda with their small children, Harry (Vincent Wettergren) and Vera (Clara Wettergren), when a potential tragedy comes barreling at them, but in the heat of the moment, while Ebba instantly seeks to protect the kids, Tomas runs for his life, leaving his family behind. After the event, which was not as bad as anticipated, the relationship among the four of them has forever changed, especially because Tomas will not own up to what happened. Even Harry and Vera (who are brother and sister in real life) know something went wrong that afternoon and are now terrified that their parents will divorce. But with Tomas unwilling to talk about his flight response, Ebba starts sharing the story with other couples, including their hirsute friend Mats (Kristofer Hivju) and his young girlfriend, Fanni (Fanni Metelius), who are soon arguing in private about what they would do in a similar situation.

There might be no going back in beautiful-looking and -sounding Swedish satire

Winner of the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival and the Swedish entry for the 2014 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Force Majeure is a blistering exploration of human nature, gender roles, and survival instinct. The often uncomfortable and utterly believable tale, inspired by a real-life event in which friends of Östlund’s were attacked by gunmen, recalls Julia Loktev’s The Loneliest Planet, in which an engaged couple encounter serious trouble and their immediate, individual reactions change their dynamic. Östlund (Play, Involuntary), who was also influenced by statistics that show that more men survive shipwrecks than women and children on a percentage basis, often keeps dialogue at a minimum, revealing the family’s growing predicament by repeating visuals with slight differences, from the way they sleep in the same bed to how they brush their teeth in front of a long mirror to the looks on their faces as they move along a motorized walkway in a tunnel at the ski resort. The ending feels forced and confusing, but everything leading up to that is simply dazzling, a treat for the senses that is impossible not to experience without wondering what you would do if danger suddenly threatened you and your loved ones.

DANCING DREAMS: TEENAGERS DANCE PINA BAUSCH’S “CONTACT ZONE”

DANCING DREAMS offers teens the chance to work with dance-theater legend Pina Bausch

TANZTRÄUME: JUGENDLICHE TANZEN “KONTAKTHOF” VON PINA BAUSCH (DANCING DREAMS: TEENAGERS DANCE PINA BAUSCH’S “CONTACT ZONE”) (Anne Linsel & Rainer Hoffmann, 2010)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Monday, October 27, $14, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.pina-bausch.de/en

From 1973 until her death in 2009, legendary dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch ran Tanztheater Wuppertal, the German company that changed the face of dance theater forever with such seminal productions as Rite of Spring, Café Müller, Danzón, Masurca Fogo, and so many others, many of which had their U.S. premieres at BAM. In 1978 she staged Kontakthof, collaborating with Rolf Borzik, Marion Cito, and Hans Pop, set to music by Juan Llossas, Charlie Chaplin, Anton Karas, Sibelius, and other composers. In 2000, she revisited the piece with a cast of senior citizens, and eight years later she turned the roles over to a group of Wuppertal high schoolers, most of whom had never heard of her and had never danced before. Director Anne Linsel and cinematographer Rainer Hoffmann follow the development of this very different production in Dancing Dreams, speaking with the eager, nervous participants, who talk openly and honestly about their hopes and desires, as well as with rehearsal directors Jo-Ann Endicott and Bénédicte Billet, who do not treat the teens with kid gloves but instead are trying to get them to reach deep inside of themselves and hold nothing back. When Bausch shows up to choose the final cast, telling the teenagers that she doesn’t bite, the tension mounts. Dancing Dreams is an intimate look at the creative process, about dedication and determination and what it takes to be an artist. It suffers at times from feeling too much like a reality television show, mixing American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance with the fictional Glee, but it also offers a last glimpse at Bausch, whose final interview is captured in the film. “You might think I’ve had enough of Kontakhtof,” she says at one point. “But every time it’s a new thing.” Dancing Dreams is screening October 27 at 7:30 in conjunction with the current production of Kontakhtof running at BAM October 23 – November 2 and will be followed by a Q&A with longtime Tanztheater Wuppertal members Billiet and Dominique Mercy, moderated by Marina Harss. In addition, on October 25 at 12 noon, BAM and Dance Umbrella will present a free live stream of “Politics of Participation,” a cross-Atlantic panel discussion at King’s College with Penny Woolcock, Matt Fenton, Kenrick “H2O” Sandy, and Michael “Mikey J” Asante and at BAM with Julie Anne Stanzak and Simon Dove, moderated by Dr. Daniel Glaser.

NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: KONTAKTHOF

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch’s KONTAKTHOF returns to BAM after nearly thirty years (photo by Oliver Look)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Jay Sharp Building
230 Lafayette Ave.
October 23 – November 2, $25-$110
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.pina-bausch.de/en

To celebrate Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch’s thirtieth anniversary of its New York debut at BAM — the German company presented Rite of Spring, 1980, Cafe Muller, and Bluebeard back in June 1984 — the innovative, influential, and highly entertaining troupe is bringing back one of its most famous works October 23 – November 2 at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House as part of the 2014 Next Wave Festival. First performed at BAM in October 1985, Kontakthof (“Courtyard of Contact”) is a playful look at the world of dance itself, as well-dressed men and women battle it out in an intensely physical competition with plenty of fun humor. The work, which includes music by Charlie Chaplin, Anton Karas, Nino Rota, Jean Sibelius, and Juan Llossas and costume and set design by Rolf Borzik, has been performed by teenagers and senior citizens since its premiere in 1978; at BAM, the current company will take the stage, led by such familiar mainstays as Rainer Behr, Dominique Mercy, Eddie Martinez, Julie Anne Stanzak, Franko Schmidt, Cristiana Morganti, Andrey Berezin, and the inimitable Nazareth Panadero. The company is continuing on following Bausch’s death in 2009 at the age of fifty-eight, with longtime TW dancer Lutz Förster as artistic director. It’s always an event when they come to Brooklyn, having dazzled dance-theater lovers with such thrilling productions as Vollmond (Full Moon), “…como el musguito en la piedra, ay si, si, si…” (Like moss on a stone), Danzón, Nefés, Masurca Fogo, and so many others over these last thirty years. If you’ve never seen this fabulous company in person, stop what you’re doing right now and pick up some tickets while they’re still left; you won’t be disappointed. You can also check out Wim Wenders’s Oscar-nominated Pina on Netflix to get a taste of what you’re in for. In conjunction with Kontakthof, on October 25 at 12 noon BAM and Dance Umbrella will present a free live stream of “Politics of Participation,” a cross-Atlantic panel discussion at King’s College with Penny Woolcock, Matt Fenton, Kenrick “H2O” Sandy, and Michael “Mikey J” Asante and at BAM with Stanzak and Simon Dove, moderated by Dr. Daniel Glaser. And on October 27 at 7:30, BAMcinématek will screen Dancing Dreams: Teenagers Dance Pina Bausch’s “Contact Zone,” followed by a Q&A with longtime Tanztheater Wuppertal members Bénédicte Billiet and Mercy, moderated by Marina Harss.

BILLY & RAY

Raymond Chandler (Larry Pine) and Billy Wilder (Vincent Kartheiser) get down to work on DOUBLE INDEMNITY in BILLY & RAY (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Vineyard Theatre
108 East 15th St. at Irving Pl.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 23, $79-$100
212-353-0303
www.vineyardtheatre.org

During his more-than-half-century career in show business, writer, director, producer, and actor Garry Marshall has been behind some of the oddest, most beloved couplings on television, including Mork & Mindy, Laverne and Shirley, Me and the Chimp (well, maybe not so beloved, but certainly odd), and, well, The Odd Couple. Now the Bronx-born director of such films as The Flamingo Kid, Pretty Woman, and Beaches is back in New York with the sitcom-y Hollywood-set show Billy & Ray, about the tense, difficult collaboration between bombastic Viennese writer-director Billy Wilder (Mad Men’s Vincent Kartheiser) and hardboiled-detective author Raymond Chandler (Casa Valentina’s Larry Pine). Having broken up with his previous writing partner, Charlie Brackett, with whom he wrote Ninotchka, Hold Back the Dawn, and Ball of Fire, each of which was nominated for a screenplay Oscar, Wilder decides to go with the little-known Chandler, who turns out to be a mild-mannered, soft-spoken married professorial type who doesn’t like Wilder’s cursing, shouting, drinking, and womanizing but sneaks sips of whiskey while claiming to be a teetotaler. The two eventually dive into James M. Cain’s novel, which Chandler calls “creaky, melodramatic nonsense,” attempting to get the lurid story about lust, greed, and murder past Joseph Breen and the ridiculously stringent Motion Picture Production Code. Ambitious young producer Joseph Sistrom (Drew Gehling) tries to navigate the murky waters with the code office and the studio while Wilder’s dedicated assistant, Helen Hernandez (Sophie von Haselberg), does whatever’s necessary to keep it all from falling apart.

Helen Hernandez (Sophie von Haselberg) and Joseph Sistrom (Drew Gehling) try to keep Chandler and Wilder together in BILLY & RAY (photo by Carol Rosegg)

Although not quite the screwball comedy Marshall and playwright Mike Bencivenga (Single Bullet Theory, Happy Hour) want it to be, Billy & Ray is an engaging behind-the-scenes look at the creation of one of the greatest works in film noir history, a seminal, genre-redefining movie whose overall effect and influence had repercussions throughout Hollywood and the world. Pine is gentle and calm as Chandler, a henpecked writer initially in it just to make a buck, while a miscast Kartheiser overplays the unpredictable, iconoclastic Wilder, who fights the system despite being part of it. Gehling (On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Jersey Boys) and von Haselberg, in her New York theater debut, offer solid support, playing their parts with an energizing gusto that serves as a much-needed break from the conflicts between the two protagonists. (If von Haselberg reminds you of Bette Midler, that’s no surprise, because she’s the daughter of the Divine Miss M; her only film appearance came as a five-year-old in Marshall’s Frankie and Johnny.) Charlie Corcoran’s set is so charming and welcoming, it’s worth checking out the model in the downstairs lobby, near some archival photographs of stills from deleted scenes from the film. (The Vineyard has also re-created part of the office with a typewriter, suitcase, and other related ephemera.) Though not nearly as taut and literate as James Lapine’s Tony-nominated Act One, the recent Broadway play about the first collaboration between Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, Billy & Ray is a treat especially for fans of Double Indemnity, as the play reveals what went into some of the key moments of the classic noir. However, after Chandler and Wilder discuss changing the ending of the movie by cutting a scene, the play concludes with a wholly unnecessary coda that is a disturbing departure from the trusting relationship that had been built between the actors and the audience and will hopefully wind up on the cutting-room floor.

PRIVATE VIOLENCE

Deanna Walters shares her harrowing story in Cynthia Hill’s gripping PRIVATE VIOLENCE

PRIVATE VIOLENCE (Cynthia Hill, 2014)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
October 17-23
212-255-2243
www.quadcinema.com
www.privateviolence.com

More than thirty years after Faith McNulty’s book The Burning Bed, which was adapted into a powerful and influential 1984 film starring Farrah Fawcett, Private Violence shows that there is still a long way to go in dealing with the very real issue of battered women. In the moving, emotional documentary, director-producer Cynthia Hill tells the story of Deanna Walters, an abused North Carolina housewife working with advocates Kit Gruelle and Stacy Cox to try to put Deanna’s dangerous and abusive husband behind bars so she can have a life with her young daughter. It’s horrifying to see photos of Deanna’s severely beaten face and body, then hear that law enforcement agencies and the legal system still often regard such cases as minor domestic disputes that do not require arrests and imprisonment. At the center of the controversy is the prevailing attitude that it is somehow the woman’s fault for not simply leaving her abusive partner, instead returning again and again for more physical and psychological torture, a premise that is proved wrong in many ways. Hill (The Guest Worker, Tobacco Money Feeds My Family) concentrates on the main narrative, not talking heads and statistics, following the developments procedurally, while more is revealed about Kit as well, who suffered her own torment at the hands of an abusive husband.

Victim advocate Kit Gruelle fights the system to help battered women gain justice in North Carolina

Sharply shot by photojournalist and cinematographer Rex Miller (Behind These Walls, Hill’s PBS food series A Chef’s Life), the award-winning film opens with a gripping six-minute scene that brings viewers right into the middle of a harrowing situation. “I sometimes refer to restraining orders as a last will and testament because battered women are the experts in what’s happening in their relationship, and we need — society — we need to treat them like the experts that they are,” Kit says shortly thereafter in a radio interview. “When she says, ‘He is going to kill me,’ or ‘He’s going to kill my family,’ or ‘He’s going to kill my cousin if he can’t get to me,’ we have got to step on the brakes and slow down and take that whole thing seriously.” A presentation of HBO Documentary Films, Private Violence had its New York premiere in June at the Walter Reade Theater in the “Women’s Rights and Children’s Rights” section of the 2014 Human Rights Watch Film Festival and is now playing October 17-23 at the Quad.

WATCHERS OF THE SKY

WATCHERS OF THE SKY (Edet Belzberg, 2014)
Lincoln Plaza Cinema
1886 Broadway between 62nd & 63rd Sts.
Opens Friday, October 17
212-757-2280
www.lincolnplazacinema.com
www.watchersofthesky.com

In 1943, Polish-born lawyer Raphael Lemkin, determined to stop the mass atrocities that were being committed by governments around the world, came up with a name for what he was lobbying heavily to make an official crime recognized by the international community: genocide. In Watchers of the Sky, director and producer Edet Belzberg (Children Underground) explores Lemkin’s vision through the modern-day work of four people battling against the odds to end genocide and bring those responsible to justice. Inspired by Samantha Power’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Belzberg follows Chad field director Emmanuel Uwurukundo of the UN Refugee Agency as he tries to find humanity among the horrific suffering in Darfur after losing most of his family in Rwanda; Transylvania-born Benjamin Ferencz, the chief U.S. prosecutor in the Einsatzgruppen Case in Nuremberg who today continues to implore the UN to do something about the horrifying crimes of aggression being perpetrated by multiple countries; Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court whose job was to gather evidence to arrest and try Sudan leader Omar al-Bashir for war crimes; and Power, the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations who uses Lemkin’s activism to attempt to end the inaction of the international community, which sits idly by as mass murder takes place right under its nose.

The inspiring, often shocking words of Raphael Lemkin are at the center of documentary about genocide

“What was amazing about Raphael Lemkin, a rural wunderkind of sorts, was that he saw the universal connection with victims and the universal capacity to carry out harms of great magnitude,” Power says in the film. “And that led him to have great conviction that no one was safe.” Meanwhile, Uwurukundo explains, “You feel this guilt on your heart. . . . This kind of experience you live with, you cannot explain to someone. Sometimes, it’s even, you feel ashamed that you didn’t do anything. But actually, you could not do anything,” echoing the words of Lemkin, who admitted, “How could I explain the pain of millions, the hopes for salvation from death? A tremendous conspiracy of silence poisoned the air. I was shamed by my helplessness.” Belzberg includes haunting animation, archival footage of Lemkin and excerpts from his notebooks, news reports documenting the ethnic cleansing of Armenians, Jews, Christians, Rwandans, Darfuris, Bosnians, and others, and scenes of Power, Ferencz, Ocampo-Moreno, and Uwurukundo facing what could have been faith-shattering obstacles as they try to make a difference in a mind-boggling world. “Why is the killing of a million a lesser crime than the killing of an individual?” Lemkin asked many years ago, and it’s frightening that such a question still needs to be answered today. Watchers of the Sky should be mandatory viewing for every member of the United Nations, each employee of The Hague, and all world leaders, who then must do something about these unspeakable, never-ending horrors.