this week in film and television

“ONE DAY PINA ASKED…”

Rarely screened 1983 documentary delves into Pina Bausch’s creative process (photo courtesy Icarus Films)

“ONE DAY PINA ASKED…” (UN JOUR PINA A DEMANDÉ) (Chantal Akerman, 1983)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
June 6-12
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com

In 1982, Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman followed Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal on a five-week tour of Europe as the cutting-edge troupe traveled to Milan, Venice, and Avignon. “I was deeply touched by her lengthy performances that mingle in your head,” Akerman says at the beginning of the resulting documentary, “One Day Pina Asked…,” continuing, “I have the feeling that the images we brought back do not convey this very much and often betray it.” Akerman (Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles; Je tu il elle) needn’t have worried; her fifty-seven-minute film, made for the Repères sur la Modern Dance French television series, is filled with memorable moments that more than do justice to Bausch’s unique form of dance theater. From 1973 up to her death in 2009 at the age of sixty-eight, Bausch created compelling works that examined the male-female dynamic and the concepts of love and connection with revolutionary stagings that included spoken word, unusual costuming, an unpredictable movement vocabulary, and performers of all shapes, sizes, and ages. Akerman captures the troupe, consisting of twenty-six dancers from thirteen countries, in run-throughs, rehearsals, and live presentations of Komm Tanz Mit Mir (Come Dance with Me), Nelken (Carnations), 1980, Kontakthof, and Walzer, often focusing in on individual dancers in extreme close-ups that reveal their relationship with their performance. Although Bausch, forty at the time, is seen only at the beginning and end of the documentary, her creative process is always at center stage. At one point, dancer Lutz Förster tells a story of performing Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” in sign language in response to Bausch’s asking the troupe to name something they’re proud of. Förster, who took over as artistic director in April 2013, first performs the song for Akerman, then later is shown performing it in Nelken. (Bausch fans will also recognize such longtime company members as Héléna Pikon, Nazareth Panadero, and Dominique Mercy.)

Documentary includes inside look at such Tanztheater Wuppertal productions as CARNATIONS (photo courtesy Icarus Films)

Documentary includes inside look at such Tanztheater Wuppertal productions as NELKEN (photo courtesy Icarus Films)

Akerman often leaves her camera static, letting the action unfold on its own, which is particularly beautiful when she films a dance through a faraway door as shadowy figures circle around the other side. It’s all surprisingly intimate, not showy, rewarding viewers with the feeling that they are just next to the dancers, backstage or in the wings, unnoticed, as the process unfolds, the camera serving as their surrogate. And it works whether you’re a longtime fan of Bausch, only discovered her by seeing Wim Wenders’s Oscar-nominated 3D film Pina, or never heard of her. “This film is more than a documentary on Pina Bausch’s work,” a narrator says introducing the film. “It is a journey through her world, through her unwavering quest for love.” As a bonus, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will be presenting free 7:30 screenings of Gustavo Beck and Leonardo Luiz Ferreira’s 2010 documentary, Chantal Akerman, from Here, in conjunction with the June 6-12 theatrical run of ”One Day Pina Asked…”

ALL HAIL THE KING — THE FILMS OF KING HU: A TOUCH OF ZEN

King Hu’s 1971 wuxia classic, A TOUCH OF ZEN, is a trippy journey toward enlightenment

A TOUCH OF ZEN (King Hu, 1971)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Friday, June 6, $13, 7:30
Series runs June 6-17
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Watching King Hu’s 1971 wuxia classic, A Touch of Zen, brings us back to the days of couching out with Kung Fu Theater on rainy Saturday afternoons. The highly influential three-hour epic features an impossible-to-figure-out plot, a goofy romance, wicked-cool weaponry, an awesome Buddhist monk, a bloody massacre, and action scenes that clearly involve the overuse of trampolines. Still, it’s great fun, even if it is way too long. (The film, which was initially shown in two parts, earned a special technical prize at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival.) Shih Jun stars as Ku Shen Chai, a local calligrapher and scholar who is extremely curious when the mysterious Ouyang Nin (Tin Peng) suddenly show up in town. It turns out that Ouyang is after Miss Yang (Hsu Feng) to exact “justice” for the corrupt Eunuch Wei, who is out to kill her entire family. Hu (Come Drink with Me, Dragon Gate Inn) fills the film with long, poetic establishing shots of fields and the fort, using herky-jerky camera movements (that might or might not have been done on purpose) and throwing in an ultra-trippy psychedelic mountain scene that is about as 1960s as it gets. A Touch of Zen is ostensibly about Ku’s journey toward enlightenment, but it’s also about so much more, although we’re not completely sure what that is. The film kicks off BAMcinématek’s “All Hail the King: The Films of King Hu” series, which runs June 6-17 and pays tribute to the Shaw Brothers veteran with such other works as The Love Eterne, Come Drink with Me, All the King’s Men, and The Valiant Ones in addition to movies it influenced and/or is related to, including Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar, Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.

SWOON: SUBMERGED MOTHERLANDS

Swoon’s “Submerged Motherlands” fills the Brooklyn Museum’s fifth-floor rotunda (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Brooklyn Museum
Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery, fifth floor
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Wednesday – Sunday through August 24, $12 ($15 including “Ai Weiwei: According to What?”)
Art Off the Wall: Swoon’s “Submerged Collaborations,” June 12, $15, 6:30
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org
www.facebook.com/SwoonStudio

“Is this insane? Is this dangerous? Should I not do this?” Brooklyn-based artist Caledonia Dance Curry, aka Swoon, asked an engineer when she first began putting together “Submerged Motherlands,” her enormous, environmentally conscious installation at the Brooklyn Museum. Filling much of the institution’s fifth-floor rotunda, the site-specific exhibit features two rickety-looking handmade junk rafts, Alice and Maria, that Swoon constructed using found materials, then sailed in New York waters for “Miss Rockaway Armada” and along Venice’s Grand Canal as part of her “Swimming Cities of Serenissima” project. At the center is a tall tree, made of dense layers of dyed fabric and elaborately detailed white cut-paper leaves, that rises to the rotunda’s seventy-two-foot-high circular skylight. The walls of the room suggest water and submersion, splattered with swoops of blue and green paint applied using fire extinguishers, interacting with light and shadow. “Submerged Motherlands” references climate change, Hurricane Sandy, and Doggerland, the Ice Age-era landmass that connected Great Britain and Europe and was destroyed by a tsunami; it also has conceptual ties to the Konbit Shelter sustainable building project in Haiti begun by Swoon and other artists shortly after the 2010 earthquake, as well as Swoon and art collective Transformazium’s Braddock Tiles community-based microfactory being built in an abandoned church in Pennsylvania. “Submerged Motherlands” also includes a healing gazebo decorated with corrugated cardboard honeycombs and wasp nests, and large-scale prints and drawings that recall Swoon’s wheatpastes, which dotted the streets of the city in recent years; here she depicts mothers and children and taliswomen, from a homeless Buddha figure to a friend breast-feeding to depictions of Swoon’s mother’s life cycle; her drug- and alcohol-addicted mother passed away from lung cancer last year.

There’s a distinctly feminist quality to Swoon’s site-specific installation at the Brooklyn Museum (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Is it insane and dangerous? Probably, but we’re all the better for Swoon’s having gone ahead with “Submerged Motherlands,” an intimate, compelling, and welcoming exploration of life, death, and rebirth. The exhibition continues through August 24; on June 12, Swoon will participate in “Art Off the Wall: Swoon’s ‘Submerged Collaborations,’” which will include a screening of Flood Tide, Todd Chandler’s fictional film about the “Swimming Cities” project; a talk with Swoon and some of her collaborators; and a silent procession from the auditorium to the installation for a live performance by the Submerged Motherlands Orchestra (consisting of Mirah, Marshall LaCount, Chandler, the band North America, and violinist Chloe Swantner).

FRONT/ROW CINEMA: RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

Caesar has had quite enough in excellent PLANET OF THE APES reboot

SEE/CHANGE: RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (Rupert Wyatt, 2011)
South Street Seaport
Corner of Front & Fulton Sts.
Saturday, June 7, free, 8:00
www.southstreetseaport.com
www.apeswillrise.com

Director Rupert Wyatt and writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver reimagine Pierre Boulle’s original Planet of the Apes story in the exciting and inventive reboot Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Taking elements from the first five Apes films, especially the fourth flick, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, this blockbuster is a more science-based thriller that delves into the evolutionary (and devolutionary) nature of humans and animals. James Franco stars as Will Rodman, a scientist working on the anti-Alzheimer’s drug ALZ-112 for Gen-Sys, a big pharmaceutical company run by Steven Jacobs (David Oyelowo). After a demonstration for potential investors goes terribly wrong, Jacobs orders all of the ALZ-112 test subjects to be destroyed, but the baby of the primary subject survives and is brought home by Will, who raises Caesar (a motion-captured Andy Serkis) as if the chimpanzee were his own child, with the help of his scientist girlfriend, Caroline (Slumdog Millionaire’s Freida Pinto) and his father (John Lithgow), who was suffering from Alzheimer’s but is seeing remarkable improvement as Will secretly treats him with the controversial drug. As Caesar grows up, he gains insight into the state of the world, especially how apes are forced to literally live like caged animals, and soon he is ready to do something about it. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is no mere remake or summer popcorner capitalizing on the fame of the series (for that, see Tim Burton’s terrible 2001 disaster); instead, it is a moving, thoughtful study of the development of mammalian intelligence and the very basic need to be free. Wyatt (The Escapist) moves things along at a slow pace in the first half of the film, allowing Caesar’s character to blossom, leading to a believable revolution that culminates in an action-packed showdown on the Golden Gate Bridge. Serkis, who previously played such motion-capture characters as Gollum and King Kong, breathes remarkable life and emotion into Caesar, so much so that there was Oscar buzz around his performance. Rise earns its already respected place in the Apes pantheon, a worthy addition that honors the past while paving the way for a promising future.

Caesar (Andy Serkis) and Will (James Franco) bond in RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

Although it is not a remake or a sequel, Rise does fit within the Apes mythology, and it includes numerous tributes to its predecessors: Gen-Sys head Jacobs is named for the producer of the five original films, Arthur P. Jacobs; Gen-Sys chimp handler Robert Franklin (Tyler Labine) is a subtle nod to the director of the first film, Franklin J. Schaffner; the circus orangutan Maurice pays tribute to Maurice Evans, who played the orangutan Dr. Zaius in the original; the chimp Cornelia is a sly combination of favorite characters Cornelius and Dr. Zira from the first flicks; and Brian Cox as John Landon and Tom Felton as Dodge, his son, remember original Apes astronauts Landon (Robert Gunner) and Dodge (Jeff Burton). In addition, at one point a television monitor shows a clip of Charlton Heston playing Julius Caesar, and one of the most famous lines from the original makes an appearance in this reboot, which ends with more than a hint that sequels are to follow, beginning in July 2014 with Matt Reeves’s Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, starring Jason Clarke, Keri Russell, Gary Oldman, and Serkis again as Caesar. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is screening June 7 as part of the South Street Seaport’s “Front/Row Cinema: See/Change” series, which continues Wednesday and Saturday nights through August 31. For a day-by-day listing of free summer movie screenings throughout New York City, go here.

MIZOGUCHI: WOMEN OF THE NIGHT

Sisters face terrible decisions in Kenji Mizoguchi’s unrelenting WOMEN OF THE NIGHT

WOMEN OF THE NIGHT (YORU NO ONNATACHI) (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1948)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Sunday, June 8, 4:30, free with museum admission of $12
Series runs May 2 – June 8
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

“I’ll find freedom and happiness my own way,” Kumiko (Tomie Tsunoda) declares in Women of the Night, but there’s no freedom or happiness for women in Kenji Mizoguchi’s bleak vision of postwar Japan. Based on the novel Joseimatsuri by Eijiro Hisaita, the 1948 film is another in the director’s series of harrowing works dealing with women who are given no option in society other than prostitution. Fusako (Kinuyo Tanaka) is trying to make ends meet as she awaits her husband’s return from the war and nursing her sick infant, but after learning that her husband is dead and losing their child to tuberculosis, she has little choice but to start selling her body. When her younger sister, Natsuko (Sanae Takasugi), finds out what she is doing, she tries to save her, but the system is against them. Meanwhile, Fusako’s young sister-in-law, Kumiko, decides to run away, but she is quickly beaten down as well. Mizoguchi, whose family sold his sister into prostitution, explored similar territory in such earlier films as Sisters of the Gion and Osaka Elegy and in his 1956 masterpiece, Street of Shame, sets Women of the Night in a near-postapocalyptic landscape, the ruined women equated with the rubble surrounding them, lending the film a neo-Realist quality. Nearly all of the men in the film are bad, creating conditions that have the women fighting against one another instead of helping each other out of their ever-more-dire circumstances. It’s a dark, unrelenting film featuring several daring shots, leading to a brutal, memorable finale. Women of the Night is screening June 8 at 4:30 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s five-week tribute to the master auteur — who made more than eighty films, less than half of which still exist — and continues with such other works as Princess Yang Kwei-fei, The Lady of Musashino, A Woman of Rumor, and Tales of the Taira Clan.

SORCERER

Roy Scheider goes on an existential voyage of the soul in William Friedkin’s SORCERER

SORCERER (William Friedkin, 1977)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
May 30 – June 5
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

In the mid-1970s, Chicago-born director William Friedkin was riding high, earning an Oscar for The French Connection and another nomination for The Exorcist, two huge critical and box-office successes. For his next film, he decided to reimagine a seminal work that had had a profound influence on him, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s haunting 1953 suspense thriller, The Wages of Fear. “It turned out to be the most difficult, frustrating, and dangerous film I’ve ever made, and it took a toll on my health as well as my reputation,” Friedkin wrote in his 2013 memoir, The Friedkin Connection. Friedkin’s adaptation of Clouzut’s classic, itself based on a novel by Georges Arnaud, follows four unlikable men — a thief (Roy Scheider), a hit man (Francisco Rabal), an embezzler (Bruno Cremer), and a terrorist (Amidou) — hiding out under fake identities in a depressed, nowhere village in South America. When a nearby oil well catches fire, the company needs four men to drive two rickety trucks more than two hundred miles over treacherous terrain to deliver cases of rotting, highly unstable dynamite that will be used to blow the whole thing up and put out the fire. Oil man Corlette (Ramon Bieri) is sending two trucks — dubbed “Lazaro” and “Sorcerer” — because he thinks only one, if any, will make it through. The journey includes a harrowing twelve-minute scene as the men try to navigate a dilapidated rope bridge in a rainstorm as well as a psychedelic trip through a fantastical landscape (shot in the Bisti Badlands in New Mexico).

Harrowing bridge crossing is one of the most suspenseful scenes ever caught on film

What began as a dream project — Friedkin was pretty much given carte blanche by the studio, and he initially had his ideal cast lined up, consisting of Steve McQueen, Marcello Mastroianni, Lino Ventura, and Amidou — quickly turned into a nightmare as the cast changed, location problems flared up, a cinematographer had to be fired because of improper lighting, a narc forced Friedkin to get rid of some drug-using crew members, “Marvin the Torch” had to be called in to help with an explosion, and malaria ran rampant, as did the budget. When the film was finally released in June 1977, it got lost in all the Star Wars hoopla, resulting in a critical and box-office failure that shattered Friedkin, whose next three films were The Brink’s Job, Cruising, and Deal of the Century. But Friedkin has always stood behind Sorcerer: “I had persevered to make a film that I would want to see,” he wrote in his memoir, “a relentless existential voyage that would become my legacy.” After fighting for the rights to the film, he supervised a digital restoration that confirms the film as a towering achievement, a gripping, intense work of suspense that digs deep into the soul. Scheider, who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for The French Connection and then was extremely upset when Friedkin refused to cast him as Father Damien in The Exorcist, gives an extraordinary performance as Jackie Scanlon, a New Jersey Irish gang member now going by the name Juan Dominguez, ready to do whatever it takes to get out of the hell he is in. Friedkin and editor Bud Smith cut the film to match Tangerine Dream’s electronic score — the German group wrote the music to the script, without seeing a single frame of the finished product — creating an intense pace that never lets up. The digital restoration, which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, was just released on Blu-ray and DVD, and is currently playing at Film Forum, restores Friedkin’s Sorcerer legacy, as critics and audiences reevaluate it as a remarkable triumph after all these years. The title is still terrible and the final scene highly questionable, but Sorcerer is an unforgettable, powerfully realistic work of magic.

WE ARE THE BEST!

Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne), Bobo (Mira Barkhammar), and Klara (Mira Grosin) form a punk band in WE ARE THE BEST!

WE ARE THE BEST (VI ÄR BÄST) (Lukas Moodysson, 2013)
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, May 30
www.magpictures.com

Thank goodness Lukas Moodysson changed his mind. After his 2009 film, Mammoth, and the death of his father, the Swedish director of such indie faves as Show Me Love, Together, and Lilya 4-ever was extremely depressed and considering quitting the movie business. But he was eventually inspired to make a happy film, and the result is the absolutely delightful We Are the Best! A liberal adaptation of his wife Coco’s semiautobiographical graphic novel Never Goodnight, the film, set in 1982 Sweden, follows the adventures of thirteen-year-old best friends Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) and Klara (Mira Grosin), a pair of outsiders who think they are rebellious punk rockers, making statements by running down the up escalator at the mall and writing an anti-sports song. Joined by fourteen-year-old Christian classical guitarist Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne), they form a punk band to rival middle school heavy metalers Iron Fist. Determined to show that punk is not dead, they futz with their hair, attempt to bond with a teen-boy punk trio, and try their darnedest to gel as a band, even though drummer Bobo and bassist Klara don’t really know how to play their instruments. All the adults in the film, primarily Klara’s parents (Lena Carlsson and David Dencik), Bobo’s mother (Anna Rydgren) and her strange friends, and the two youth recreation leaders (Matte Wiberg and Johan Liljemark, real-life members of the band Sabotage), are pretty goofy themselves, not exactly your prototypical role models, so silliness pervades in wonderfully funny ways. Writer-director Moodysson celebrates the sheer joy and utter ridiculousness of childhood throughout We Are the Best!, never getting overly serious and allowing his three young stars to improvise, which makes their characters that much more honest and endearing, both in small moments and within the overall narrative, which concentrates on having fun. And indeed, We Are the Best! is nothing if not a whole lot of fun.