this week in film and television

BELLATRIX!: A SOUL TRAIN TRIBUTE TO WOMEN IN MUSIC FEATURING TWENTY FEET FROM STARDOM

Darlene Love talks about going from backup vocalist to lead singer in Oscar-winning documentary

Marcus Garvey Park
18 Mt. Morris Park West
Sunday, August 17, free, 7:00
www.summerstage.donyc.com
www.twentyfeetfromstardom.com

It’s easy to see why Morgan Neville’s Twenty Feet from Stardom was such a critical and popular success, raking in more than five million dollars at the box office and winning an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. Yes, it tells the story of a fabulous group of remarkably talented backup singers, including Darlene Love, Judith Hill, Merry Clayton, Lisa Fischer, Táta Vega, Claudia Lennear, Jo Lawry, Lynn Mabry, and David Lasley. Yes, there are some big-time superstars singing their praises, including Bette Midler, Bruce Springsteen, Sting, Stevie Wonder, Chris Botti, and Mick Jagger. And the music and inside tales are simply phenomenal, particularly the behind-the-scenes scoop on “Gimme Shelter,” which featured Clayton on the original record, while Fischer’s been singing it live onstage with the Stones for the last twenty-five years; surprising looks at Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” and David Bowie’s “Young Americans”; Love discussing Phil Spector, “He’s a Rebel,” and cleaning houses; and Hill’s attempt to be both a background vocalist and the lead singer playing her own songs. (Sadly, Clayton was involved in a serious car accident this June and “has a long road of recovery ahead,” according to her website.)

But at the film’s tender heart is the idea of honoring the people in the back, those without whom many of these famous success stories might be very different. Most Americans, when it comes down to it, live in the background, the men and women who make things happen while someone else ultimately gets the credit. In Twenty Feet from Stardom, the background singers finally get their due, and in a way each and every one of us does as well. Of course, it also helps that these marvelous women have sensational voices and plenty of great anecdotes to share. Twenty Feet from Stardom is screening August 17 at 7:00 in Marcus Garvey Park at the special SummerStage / ImageNation Cinema Foundation presentation “Bellatrix! A Soul Train Tribute to Women in Music,” which begins with live performances by Jamila Raegan, the Ki Ki Experience, and Raye 6 & Phyllisia Ross, with Winston’s Crew Collective and the Firey String Sistas serving as the house band, followed by a Soul Train Jam spun by Ubiquita Sound System.

ROCKAWAY!

Visitors are encouraged to move around rocks in Patti Smith installation in Rockaway Beach (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

MoMA PS1
Fort Tilden and Rockaway Beach
Thursday – Sunday through September 1, free, 12 noon – 6:00 pm
www.momaps1.org
rockaway! slideshow

Both MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach and multidisciplinary artist Patti Smith had close ties to the Rockaways prior to the destruction wrought by Hurricane Sandy in October 2012, each having homes there that were affected by the disaster. As part of the continuing recovery effort, the two have teamed up with the Jamaica Bay-Rockaway Parks Conservancy, the Rockaway Artists Alliance, and the National Park Service for the free public arts festival “Rockaway!” Held in conjunction with the reopening of Fort Tilden, a former U.S. Army Coast Artillery Post established nearly a century ago and a place that Smith visited often with Robert Mapplethorpe back in the 1970s, “Rockaway!” consists of several projects spread throughout the vast acreage. In the military chapel, which is undergoing restoration, Janet Cardiff has installed her delightful audio piece “The Forty Part Motet,” which has previously been shown at MoMA PS1’s home base in Long Island City and at the Cloisters, the first contemporary artwork ever presented at the Met’s medieval-themed outpost in Fort Tryon Park. “The Forty Part Motet” consists of forty speakers on stands arranged in a circle, each speaker playing the voice of one of the forty members of the Salisbury Cathedral Choir as they perform Thomas Tallis’s sixteenth-century choral composition “Spem in Alium Nunquam habui,” the English translation of which is “In no other is my hope,” a title that is particularly appropriate given the location. First walk around to hear each unique voice, then sit in the middle and let the glorious full music envelop you. “The Forty Part Motet” is on view through August 17; the rest of the show is up through September 1.

Patti Smith’s “Resilience of the Dreamer” creates a kind of fairy tale in middle of decimated building (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

In another building, Smith and her daughter, Jesse, pay tribute to one of Patti’s heroes, Walt Whitman, with the short film The Good Gray Poet, in which Patti reads the New York-born writer’s “Country Days and Nights,” “Mannahatta,” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (“Flood-tide below me! I see you face to face! . . . On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose”) while wandering through the Camden cemetery where he is buried. The film also includes shots of other places related to Whitman’s life, and there are various historical items in a display case and a bookshelf where visitors are invited to read more by and about the Bard of Democracy.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Smith’s “Resilience of the Dreamer,” a gilded four-poster canopy bed positioned in the middle of building T9, a former locomotive repair facility that has been filled with junk and detritus since Sandy. The piece, which calls to mind the destruction of so many homes along the beach, their facades ripped away during the storm, exposing people’s lives, has been decaying since its installation in June; the canopy is ripping, the sheets turning yellow, dirt collecting on the bed as the elements lay waste to it through the broken windows and battered roof. In a heavily graffitied side room, Smith has collected white stones and placed them in a large birdbath, where people are encouraged to pick one out and place it somewhere else — there are rocks in virtually every nook and cranny, from light switches and windowsills to holes in the wall and floor — or even take one home as a memory. In addition, in the sTudio 7 Gallery, Smith is displaying more than one hundred small-scale black-and-white photos primarily of possessions of friends, colleagues, and influences as well as gravesites. Among the images are Robert Graves’s hat, William Burroughs’s bandanna, Virginia Woolf’s cane, Mapplethorpe’s star mirror, and the Rimbaud family atlas, as well as beds belonging to Woolf, Victor Hugo, John Keats, Vanessa Bell, and Maynard Keynes and the tombs and headstones of Susan Sontag, Herman Hesse, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Jim Morrison. There is also a stage in the room where musical performances are held on Sunday nights; the next one will be the Jammin Jon Birthday Concert Bash on August 17 at 6:00, with fusion trio Dream Speed and experimental guitarist and Brooklyn native Jammin Jon Kiebon.

Granite cubes throughout Fort Tilden are part of Patti Smith tribute to Walt Whitman (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Scattered throughout Fort Tilden, which is part of the Gateway National Recreation Area, are five granite cubes on which Smith has put Whitman quotes (“O madly the sea pushes upon the land, with love, with love”; “Passing stranger! You do not know how longingly I look upon you”) in addition to a dozen small mud-and-straw nests from Adrián Villar Rojas’s “Brick Farm” series, which evoke both home and protection. There’s a map to help locate these objects; wear long pants and closed-toe shoes because several of the passageways are laden with poison ivy. And be sure to walk to the top of the battery for a spectacular view, then make your way down a winding path to the beach. “Rockaway!” is a not only an exciting artistic venture but a terrific exploration of the past, present, and future of the area, so decimated by Hurricane Sandy but even more determined to rebuild its way of life.

Janet Cardiff’s captivating sound installation continues through August 17 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

(The exhibition is supplemented by a satellite show of works by more than seventy artists — from Marina Abramović and Ryan McNamara to Michael Stipe and Laurie Simmons, from Doug Aitken and Olaf Breuning to Olafur Eliasson and Ugo Rondinone — at Rockaway Beach Surf Club. There are several ways to get to Fort Tilden, all of which involve multiple modes of transportation. You can take the $3.50 Rockaway ferry from Pier 11 downtown to Beach 108th St., then get on the Q22 bus, or take the A train to Broad Channel, switch for the shuttle, then get the Q22 at 116th St. None of the options are quick and easy, but the ferry ride does go past Coney Island and the Statue of Liberty and under the Verazzano-Narrows Bridge. Yes, it’s a hassle, but it’s well worth it.)

JEALOUSY

Louis Garrel plays his grandfather in film directed by his father and also featuring his sister

JEALOUSY (LA JALOUSIE) (Philippe Garrel, 2013)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Francesca Beale Theater, Walter Reade Theater
144 & 165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
August 15-28
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com
www.distribfilms.com

Nearly fifty years after the release of his first film, the short Les enfants désaccordés, post-New Wave auteur Philippe Garrel has made one of his most intimate and personal works, the deeply sensitive drama Jealousy. Garrel’s son, Louis, who has previously appeared in his father’s Regular Lovers, Frontier of the Dawn, and A Burning Hot Summer, stars as Louis, a character based on Garrel’s own father, essentially playing his own grandfather. As the film opens, Louis, an actor, is leaving his wife, Clothilde (Rebecca Convenant), for another woman, Claudia (Anna Mouglalis). A talented but unsuccessful actress, Claudia immediately bonds with Louis’s young daughter, Charlotte (Olga Milshtein). But soon jealousies of all kinds — professional, romantic, maternal, paternal, residential, and financial — affect all the characters’ desires to find happiness in life.

Philippe Garrel on the set of JEALOUSY

Shot in widescreen black-and-white by Belgian cinematographer Willy Kurant, who has photographed such films as Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin Féminin, Agnès Varda’s Les creatures, and Maurice Pialat’s À nos amours during his glorious career, Jealousy is a subtle meditation on the many fears that can accompany love. Somewhat of an innocent, Louis doesn’t yet realize the consequences of his actions, thinking that he can slide through life and good things will just happen. But as his love for the secretive Claudia grows, so do the problems they all encounter. Philippe Garrel wrote the film, which is divided into two sections, titled “I Kept the Angels” and “Sparks in a Powder Keg,” with three collaborators, Caroline Deruas, Arlette Langmann, and Marc Cholodenko, who each took on different scenes, resulting in a choppiness that can be off-putting and disorienting at times, but the strong performances (featuring significant improvisation), tender pacing, quiet interludes, and melancholic score by Jean-Louis Aubert overcome that drawback. The film is very much a family affair — in addition to Philippe directing his son playing Philippe’s father, Philippe’s daughter, Esther Garrel, plays Louis’s sister — adding to the poignancy and intimacy of this very moving story.

RED HOLLYWOOD AND THE BLACKLIST: ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW

Harry Belafonte, Ed Begley, and Robert Ryan go after a big score in ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW

ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW (Robert Wise, 1959)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Sunday, August 17, 1:15
Series runs through April 10
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com

“I want a safe thing,” Dave Burke (Ed Begley) tells Earl Slater (Robert Ryan) near the beginning of Robert Wise’s 1959 crime drama Odds Against Tomorrow. “This is a one-time job. One roll of the dice and then we’re through forever.” But it’s never that easy, either in real life or in film noir. At first Slater, a hard and fast old-time racist, doesn’t want in on the job because the third man is Johnny Ingram (Harry Belafonte), a smooth-talking black nightclub singer trying to support his ex-wife, Ruth (Kim Hamilton), and their young daughter, Eadie (Lois Thorne), while in debt to a local mobster (Will Kuluva). But Slater has problems of his own; he’s tired of being supported by his devoted girlfriend, Lorry (Shelley Winters), and helping out their extremely flirtatious neighbor, Helen (Gloria Grahame). Soon they are converging on a bank in the small upstate town of Melton, New York, thinking that one big score will settle all of life’s ills. But things rarely work out that way, especially in black-and-white heist films.

Although often stiff, overwrought, and lacking nuance, there’s a lot to like about Odds Against Tomorrow, the first film noir to feature a lead black actor. Belafonte, who also helped finance the film, is particularly compelling, playing a strong black man who is not going to give in to anyone. The rest of the cast is excellent, from the primary trio through the supporting characters, with excellent cameos by Cicely Tyson, Mae Barnes, Carmen de Lavallade, and Wayne Rogers. There’s a wonderful scene in Central Park, where Johnny spends a day with Eadie, and the musical soundtrack is exceptional, composed by John Lewis and performed by the Modern Jazz Quartet. Wise (The Day the Earth Stood Still, West Side Story) keeps things mostly straightforward, the racist angle always threatening, a kind of lurid Asphalt Jungle meets The Defiant Ones. Based on a novel by William P. McGivern, the film has quite a pedigree: The script was written by blacklisted writer-director Abraham Polonsky (Body and Soul, Force of Evil) and Nelson Gidding, and the film was photographed by Joseph Brun (Edge of the City, Hatari!) and edited by one of the best ever, Dede Allen (The Hustler, Bonnie & Clyde, Dog Day Afternoon). Odds Against Tomorrow is screening August 17 at 1:15 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Red Hollywood and the Blacklist” and will be introduced by Red Hollywood codirector Thom Andersen; the festival runs August 15-21 and also includes Joseph Losey’s The Big Night, Cy Endfield’s Hell Drivers, Frank Tuttle’s I Stole a Million, and Polonsky’s Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here.

CARAX: HOLY MOTORS

Léos Carax’s HOLY MOTORS is a dazzling tribute to Paris, cinema, and the art of storytelling

HOLY MOTORS (Léos Carax, 2012)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
August 15, 18, 21
Series runs August 15-21
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
www.holymotorsfilm.com

French writer-director Léos Carax (Boy Meets Girl, Mauvais Sang) has made only five feature films in his thirty-plus-year career, a sadly low output for such an innovative, talented director, but in 2012 he gave birth to his masterpiece, the endlessly intriguing, confusing, and exhilarating Holy Motors. His first film since 1999’s POLA X, the new work is a surreal tale of character and identity, spreading across multiple genres in a series of bizarre, entertaining, and often indecipherable set pieces. Holy Motors opens with Carax himself playing le Dormeur, a man who wakes up and walks through a hidden door in his room and into a movie theater where a packed house, watching King Vidor’s The Crowd, is fast asleep. The focus soon shifts to Carax alter ego Denis Lavant as Monsieur Oscar, a curious character who is being chauffeured around Paris in a white stretch limo driven by the elegant Céline (Édith Scob). Oscar has a list of assignments for the day that involve his putting on elaborate costumes — including revisiting his sewer character from Merde, Carax’s contribution to the 2009 omnibus Tokyo! that also included shorts by Michel Gondry and Bon Joon-ho — and becoming immersed in scenes that might or might not be staged, blurring the lines between fiction and reality within, of course, a completely fictional world to begin with. It is as if each scene is a separate little movie, and indeed, Carax, whose middle name is Oscar, has said that he made Holy Motors after several other projects fell through, so perhaps he has melded many of those ideas into this fabulously abstruse tale that constantly reinvents itself. The film is also a loving tribute to Paris, the cinema, and the art of storytelling, with direct and indirect references to Franz Kafka, E. T. A. Hoffman, Charlie Chaplin, Lon Chaney, Eadweard Muybridge, Georges Franju, and others. (Scob, who starred in Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, at one point even pulls out a mask similar to the one she wore in that classic thriller.) The outstanding cast also features Kylie Minogue, who does indeed get to sing; Eva Mendes as a robotic model; and Michel Piccoli as the mysterious Man with the Birthmark. Holy Motors is screening August 15, 18, and 21 at Film Forum in conjunction with the U.S. theatrical release of Tessa Louise-Salomé’s 2014 documentary, Mr. X: A Vision of Leos Carax; the week-long tribute to Carax includes the documentary as well as Carax’s other feature films, Pola X, Les Amants du Pont Neuf, and Mauvais Sang. (A restored version of Boy Meets Girl played Film Forum August 8-14.)

ESSENTIAL CINEMA: ZORNS LEMMA AND HAPAX LEGOMENA I: (nostalgia)

Hollis Frampton breaks down cinema into its essential audio and visual forms in experimental masterpiece ZORNS LEMMA

ZORNS LEMMA (Hollis Frampton, 1970)
HAPAX LEGOMENA I: (nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton, 1971)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Thursday, August 14, 7:30
212-505-5181
www.anthologyfilmarchives.org
www.hollisframpton.org.uk

A poet and photographer before turning to film, Ohio-born avant-garde visual artist Hollis Frampton created a unique cinema that deconstructed and reconstructed sound and image as basic structural elements, developing narratives that were more often about time, space, and memory than traditional storytelling. On August 14 at 7:30, Anthology Film Archives is screening two of his most famous works as part of its continuing Essential Cinema series. In the hour-long Zorns Lemma, which he described as a “kind of cryptic autobiography,” Frampton makes a triptych about learning the language of life and film, about how we process what we see and hear as we mature. In the first section, Canadian filmmaker Joyce Wieland reads twenty-four rhyming sentences from the eighteenth-century Puritan children’s book The Bay State Primer, each one centering on a word starting with the next letter of the ancient Greek alphabet, which does not include “J” and “V”; the accompanying visual is just the black filmstrip itself, with tics and scratches evident. In the second section, which lasts forty-five minutes, Frampton zeroes in on individual words from signs, billboards, posters, and other places around New York City, displaying them alphabetically one per second, each twenty-four-second trip from A to Z evoking the very essence of cinema, which is projected at twenty-four frames per second. As the words continue to cycle silently through, sometimes completely random, sometimes combining into intentional combinations, they are eventually replaced by moving images, roughly in reverse order of how often they are used in the English language. Thus, W-X-Y-Z become passing by city lights in the dark, a raging fire, cattails swirling in the wind, and waves going backward into the ocean. After each letter has ultimately been replaced, the third section begins, both sound and image; as a man, woman, and dog slowly make their way across a snowy landscape, the soundtrack consists of six women reading excerpts from medieval bishop Robert Grosseteste’s On Light, or the Ingression of Forms, at one word per second, accompanied by a ticking metronome. Perhaps Frampton chose six readers to evoke another of Grosseteste’s works, On the Six Days of Creation, as Zorns Lemma, named for an actual mathematical theory, is, at its very heart and soul, about the creation of cinema. It is also about duration, expectation, completion, experience, and satisfaction, and it is surprisingly gripping, even if it can occasionally get monotonous. But of course, that’s part of its charm.

Hollis Frampton burns a photograph of himself in experimental film

Hollis Frampton burns a photograph of himself in seminal experimental film

Zorns Lemma will be screening with another masterful work by Frampton, 1971’s (nostalgia). Over the course of nearly forty minutes, Frampton displays a dozen photographs one at a time, placed on a coiled electric burner that ignites the picture, eventually reducing it to ash as the camera remains static. Meanwhile, Michael Snow (Wavelength) narrates Frampton’s first-person words in a deadpan voice over each photograph, discussing how he (Frampton) came to took it, sharing details about his life as well as his thoughts on art, name-dropping such friends, classmates, and colleagues as onetime roommate Carl Andre, Frank Stella, Larry Poons, and Snow himself. However, Frampton is actually talking about the next photograph in the sequence, not the one that is currently disintegrating on the screen. Thus, as we see a self-portrait, he is analyzing a photograph of a cabinetmaker’s shop, which will be shown next; the self-portrait was discussed over the previous photograph, a shot of Andre in a picture frame, with a metronome. As he did with Zorns Lemma, Frampton plays with, and preys on, the viewer’s relationship with cinema, busting open the boundaries that are part of the intrinsic nature of film, becoming a treatise on time and the fallibility of memory. It is also about the impermanence of both life and art; as each photograph crumbles, he leaves the camera on it as it morphs into a kind of black ash sculpture, each one unique and original. “Language and image, each trespassing in the other’s house, secrete disquieting disjunctions, conundrums, circularities,” Frampton explained in 1979. “We are accustomed to the poetic strategy, within language, of bracketing a noun within the genus of yet another noun, which may come from an alien phylum, a foreign kingdom. Translation of that strategy into the economy of images yields artifacts . . . savagely grotesque, arch, silly . . . that seem to flee the rigors of self-reference; contradictory images, far from coalescing in a dialectical encounter, annihilate one another in a gesture that sweeps language clean of specification and seems on the point of suggesting a raw map of the preconscious work — the material ACTION — of language.” In Zorns Lemma and (nostalgia) , Frampton, who died in 1984 at the age of forty-eight, still in the midst of his epic Magellan cycle, poetically deals with “disquieting disjunctions, conundrums, [and] circularities,” resulting in a pair of captivating, disorienting, and entertainingly philosophical self-referential works that will continue to project themselves into the time and space of your own memories long after they are over.

INTREPID SUMMER MOVIE SERIES / RIVERFLICKS — BIG HIT WEDNESDAYS: CAPTAIN PHILLIPS

Tom Hanks fights for his crew and his ship in another tense thriller from expert director Paul Greengrass

CAPTAIN PHILLIPS (Paul Greengrass, 2013)
Intrepid Summer Movie Series
Thursday, August 14, Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, Pier 86, 12th Ave. & 46th St., free, dusk
RiverFlicks: Big Hit Wednesdays
Wednesday, August 20, Hudson River Park, Pier 63 lawn at 23rd St., free, dusk
www.captainphillipsmovie.com

Based on the true story of Somali pirates hijacking a Maersk container ship in the spring of 2009, Paul Greengrass’s Captain Phillips is a nonstop action thriller, a gripping film that is solidly one of the best of the year. Tom Hanks gives a riveting performance as Captain Richard Phillips, a merchant marine guiding the MV Maersk Alabama on its mission to deliver relief supplies to Somalia, Uganda, and Kenya, in addition to more standard cargo. A family man, he kisses his wife, Andrea (Catherine Keener), goodbye, then heads out on his journey, paying close attention to a memo warning of possible pirate activity. When small motorboats do indeed start approaching, Phillips tries diversionary tactics — the ship and crew were not permitted to carry any weaponry whatsoever back then — but he knows that it’s only a matter of time before they come back, and indeed the Alabama is soon boarded by four armed pirates led by Abduwali Muse (Barkhad Abdi), who capture Phillips and take over the ship. But things don’t go quite as planned for Phillips or the pirates, leading to a marvelously staged showdown finale. Greengrass, who has made such previous expert thrillers as Bloody Sunday, The Bourne Supremacy, and United 93, once again builds unrelenting tension every step of the way, even for those in the audience who might already know the outcome. The film centers on the complex relationship between the relatively easygoing Phillips and the desperate Muse, their eyes constantly meeting in penetrating gazes as they play an intense psychological game of cat and mouse. Hanks is a marvel as Phillips, giving brilliant nuance and texture to what could have been a one-note role but instead ends up being one of the finest of his outstanding career. All along the way, Greengrass keeps upping the ante, whether in a chase on the high seas or a claustrophobic battle of wills inside a lifeboat. There has been some controversy over the factual accuracy of the film, which is based on Phillips’s bestselling A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALs, and Dangerous Days at Sea (written with Stephan Talty), but that doesn’t take anything away from what is a breathtaking cinematic experience. Nominated for six Academy Awards, Captain Phillips is screening August 14 at the Intrepid Summer Movie Series and August 20 at Hudson River Park’s Pier 63, concluding the free RiverFlicks: Big Hit Wednesdays series. (For a day-by-day listing of free summer movie screenings throughout New York City, go here.)