Feminist art collective Pussy Riot states its case and faces the consequences in documentary about controversial group
PUSSY RIOT — A PUNK PRAYER (Mike Lerner & Maxim Pozdorovkin, 2012)
Socrates Sculpture Park
32-01 Vernon Blvd.
Rescheduled for Wednesday, August 27, free, 7:00
718-956-1819
www.socratessculpturepark.org
www.hbo.com
The slogan “Free Pussy Riot!” is being shouted around the world — and was even seen on Madonna’s back — ever since the Russian government arrested three members of punk collective Pussy Riot after they staged an anarchic performance of less than one minute of “Mother Mary, Banish Putin!” at Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow on February 21, 2012. British documentary producer Mike Lerner and Russian filmmaker Maxim Pozdorovkin follow the sensationalistic trial of Pussy Riot leaders Maria “Masha” Alyokhina, Nadezhda “Nadia” Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina “Katia” Samutsevich as they each face years in prison for social misconduct and antireligious behavior for what some consider a sacrilegious crime and others view as freedom of speech. The three women do a lot of eye rolling and smiling in court as they are enclosed in a glass booth, proud and unashamed of what they did, continuing to make their points about the separation between church and state, feminism, freedom, and the seemingly unlimited power of Vladimir Putin. Lerner and Pozdorovkin speak with Masha’s mother and Nadia’s and Katia’s fathers, all of whom fully support their daughters’ beliefs and discuss what their children were like growing up. Meanwhile, other members of Pussy Riot and men and women across the globe take to the streets and airwaves to try to help free the incarcerated trio, who are responsible for such songs as “Kill the Sexist,” “Death to Prison, Freedom to Protests,” and “Putin Lights Up the Fires.” Pussy Riot — A Punk Prayer is screening August 27 in Long Island City as part of Socrates Sculpture Park’s free summer Outdoor Cinema series and will be preceded by live music from Tessa Makes Love; Russian food from Pomegranate will be available for purchase as well. The sixteenth annual series continues through August 27 with such other international fare as Moussa Touré’s La Pirogue, Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, and Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D. (The program was originally scheduled for July 2 but was postponed because of the weather.)
Finally getting its North American premiere after being banned in its home country of China, Ning Hao’s No Man’s Land is a violently beautiful black comedy that takes on modernization and commercialization with tongue firmly and riotously rooted deep in cheek. Xu Zhen stars as Pan Xiao, a young hotshot lawyer, if he does say so himself, who gets a vicious falcon poacher (Duo Bujie) off for killing a cop. The poacher promises to wire Pan his fee, but the lawyer instead demands collateral in the form of the red car the poacher bought for his dead wife. Pan then sets out for home, riding across the Gobi desert in Xinjiang in northwest China, but things don’t go too well for him, as he keeps getting involved with strange, dangerous, ever-more-surreal men and women, from a pair of truck drivers transporting hay (Wang Shuangbao and Sun Jianmin) to an extortionist gas station owner (Yan Xinming) and his back-room prostitute (Yu Nan) to another falcon poacher (Huang Bo) who can’t avoid getting the crap beaten out of him time and time again. But Pan keeps trying to persevere, believing he is better than everyone around him, but it takes him quite a while to learn his lesson, if he ever really does.
Special effects master Douglas Trumbull, who worked on such sci-fi classics as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Blade Runner, made his feature directorial debut with the environmentally prescient Silent Running. Bruce Dern stars as Freeman Lowell, one of four men stationed on the space terrarium Valley Forge, which is charged with protecting forests that can no longer grow on Earth. While it’s just another assignment for John Keenan (Cliff Potts), Marty Barker (Ron Rifkin), and Andy Wolf (Jesse Vint), it’s become an obsession for Lowell, who sleeps under a “Conservation Pledge” on the wall next to his bed and only eats food from his massive garden. But when the captain of the Berkshire (voiced by Joseph Campanella) informs them that the forests must be destroyed and they are to return home, Lowell takes matters into his own hands, fighting to protect what he has helped create. Soon he is alone on the Valley Forge, tending to the forest with drones Huey (Cheryl Sparks) and Dewey (Mark Persons), as Louie (Steven Brown) is no longer with them. At first Lowell thinks he is in his own private paradise, but extreme loneliness awaits him, along with some other shocks. Written by Deric Washburn and Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter) and Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law), the low-budget Silent Running is a deserving cult classic, a worthy influence on such films and television shows as WALL-E, Moon, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and Red Dwarf. Emerging from the late-1960s Flower Power movement, the film’s ecological theme is boosted by environmentally friendly folk songs sung by Joan Baez, with overly melodramatic music by Peter Schickele. Dern gives a beautifully nuanced performance as Lowell, going from calm and meditative to distressed and angry in a heartbeat, and his paternal relationship with Huey and Dewey is both heartwarming and heartbreaking. A film that could only be made in the 1970s, with bright, bold colors and cheesy futuristic sets, Silent Running is screening June 28 at 7:00 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “See It Big! Science Fiction (Part Two)” series, which continues through July 12 with such other sci-fi flicks as Alain Resnais’s Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in 70mm, and Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks!
Inspired by Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain also involves symbolically non-Euclidean adventures in mountain climbing, funneled through Carlos Castaneda, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and magic mushrooms and LSD galore. What passes for narrative follows a Jesus look-alike thief (Horacio Salinas) and an alchemist with a thing for female nudity (Jodorowsky) on the path to enlightenment; along the way they encounter the mysterious Tarot, stigmata, stoning, eyeballs, frogs, flies, cold-blooded murder, naked young boys, chakra points, life-size plaster casts, Nazi dancers, sex, violence, blood, gambling, turning human waste into gold, death and rebirth, and the search for the secret of immortality via representatives of the planets, each with their own extremely bizarre story to tell. Jodorowsky, who is credited with having invented the midnight movie with the 1970 acid Western El Topo, literally shatters religious iconography in a kaleidoscopic whirlwind of jaw-droppingly gorgeous and often inexplicable imagery composed from a surreal color palette, set to a score by free jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and Archies keyboardist Ron Frangipane. (Frangipane also worked with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who produced this film with their business manager, Allen Klein.)