Matthew Barney’s five-and-a-half-hour epic debuts at BAM this week (photo by Hugo Glendinning)
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. between Ashland & Rockwell Pl.
February 12-16, $25-$50
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
“Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before,” Norman Mailer writes at the beginning of his 1983 novel, Ancient Evenings. “Is this the fear that holds the universe? Is pain the fundament? All the rivers veins of pain? The oceans my mind awash? I have a thirst like the heat of earth on fire. Mountains writhe. I see waves of flame. Washes, flashes, flashes, waves of flame.” New York-based visual artist Matthew Barney and Berlin-based composer and musician Jonathan Bepler have transformed Mailer’s seven-hundred-page epic about death and rebirth in Egypt into the five-and-a-half-hour cinematic spectacle River of Fundament, which is making its debut February 12-16 at the BAM Harvey. In his five-part, seven-hour Cremaster Cycle, Barney explored the ascension and descension of the cremaster muscle, which determines sexual differentiation, with a cast that included Mailer as Harry Houdini and Barney as Gary Gilmore in a section inspired by Mailer’s book The Executioner’s Song while focusing on cars and petroleum jelly in others.
RIVER OF FUNDAMENT is built around episodes in Los Angeles, Brooklyn, and Detroit (photo by Ivano Grasso)
River of Fundament begins with Mailer’s wake at an intricate reconstruction of his Brooklyn Heights home, with Mailer’s son John Buffalo Mailer playing his father’s spirit. The second act follows the reincarnation of Mailer (Milford Graves) as he is born in the River of Feces and meets medium Hathfertiti (Maggie Gyllenhaal). The third act returns to Brooklyn, with Mailer’s next reincarnation played by a 2001 Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor and Ellen Burstyn taking over as Hathfertiti. The primary cast also features Paul Giamatti, Cremaster star Aimee Mullins, Elaine Stritch, Lila Downs, Chief Dave Beautiful Bald Eagle, Joan La Barbara, and Madyn G. Coakley, with a multitude of cameos by Dick Cavett, Luc Sante, Larry Holmes, Salman Rushdie, Lawrence Weiner, Fran Lebowitz, Marti Domination, James Toback, David Amram, and dozens of others.
Cars once again are featured prominently in epic new Matthew Barney film (photo by Ivano Grasso)
The action, much of which consists of filmed performance art presentations that were held in public spaces, moves from New York City to Los Angeles to Detroit as Egyptian mythology and ritual play out in unusual ways. Barney, whose multidisciplinary Cremaster exhibition at the Guggenheim in 2002-3 was one of the best of the decade, has given New Yorkers a sneak peek at the making of River of Fundament via the ”DJED” show at the Gladstone Gallery in the fall of 2011 and the wide ranging ”Subliming Vessel” at the Morgan Library last summer. Not that they gave any real indication of what to expect, because with Barney, the only thing to expect is the unexpected. And even then, don’t expect to understand what is unfurling before you.
“Sometimes, reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world,” a growly, disembodied, mechanical-like voice says at the beginning of Jean-Luc Godard’s futuristic sci-fi noir thriller, Alphaville: Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution. Godard’s 1965 black-and-white masterpiece takes place in an unidentified time period in a dark, unadorned, special-effects-free Paris. A tough-as-nails man in hat and trench coat named Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) has arrived in Alphaville from the Outlands, claiming to be journalist Ivan Johnson, on assignment from the Figaro-Pravda newspaper. But his real mission is to first find fellow agent Henry Dickson (Akim Tamiroff), then capture or kill Alphaville leader and death-ray inventor Professor Vonbraun (Howard Vernon), the former Leonard Nosferatu. A Guadalcanal veteran who drives a Ford Galaxie, Caution — a character Constantine played in a series of films based on the novels of Peter Cheyney, including This Man Is Dangerous, Dames Get Along, and Your Turn, Darling — is a no-nonsense guy who takes nothing for granted. “All things weird are normal in this whore of cities,” he tells a blond seductress third class, who apparently comes with his hotel room. Documenting everything he sees with an Instamatic flash camera, Caution (perhaps a stand-in for Godard himself?) is soon visited by Natasha Vonbraun (Anna Karina), the professor’s daughter, setting off on an Orwellian journey through a grim city where poetry and emotion, and such words as “love,” “why,” and “conscience,” are banned in favor of “because” and “Silence. Logic. Security. Prudence,” where the hotel Bible is actually an ever-changing dictionary and enemies of the state are killed in swimming pools and pulled out by clones of Esther Williams, all overseen by a computer known as Alpha 60 (whose text, based on writings by Jorge Luis Borges, is eerily spoken by a man without a larynx, using a mechanized voice box). 
After screening at more than seventy-five international film festivals over the past two years, Juan Carlos Maneglia and Tana Schémbori’s Paraguayan thriller, 7 Boxes, is getting its official U.S. theatrical release February 7, opening at Cinema Village. The low-budget film, which was made for about half a million dollars and broke box-office records in its native country, is set in and around Municipal Market No. 4 in Paraguay’s capital city, Asunción, where seventeen-year-old Victor (Celso Sebastián Franco Ferreira) pushes a rickety wheelbarrow, helping people with their purchases, sometimes accompanied by his friend Liz (Lali González). Always on the lookout to make a quick buck in order to afford a cell phone and a television, Victor gets a call from Gus (Roberto Cardozo), asking him to make an important delivery because Gus’s usual accomplice, Nelson (Víctor Sosa Traverzi), cannot be reached and it’s an emergency. So Victor jumps at the opportunity, not caring what’s in the boxes even though he knows something shady’s going on, instead simply taking half of a hundred-dollar bill, the second half of which will be given to him upon completion of his task. But it’s not going to be very easy, because when Nelson finds out about it, he is determined to do whatever it takes to steal the deal for himself. Meanwhile, Victor’s sister, Tamara (Nelly Dávalos), is concerned not only about the trouble her younger brother might be in but also about her pregnant coworker, Leti (Katia García), who is getting no help from the father, Gus, who is more worried about what his bosses, the comic-relief duo of Don Dario (Paletita) and Luis (Nico García), are going to do to him when they learn how nothing has gone quite as planned. Maneglia and Schémbori’s debut feature, following a long career in shorts and television, has its moments, but there are far too many head-scratching plot holes, red herrings, inconsistencies, and hard-to-believe twists that detract from the film’s energy, which works best when it focuses on Victor and his desire to better his station, through technology. While Victor is a sympathetic character, played with a wide-eyed innocence by Franco, his nemesis, Nelson, is a lost cause from the start, desperate to make money to buy medicine for his sick child but never really having a moral center. Still, it’s an admirable achievement coming from a country that has produced so few full-length films. Maneglia and Schémbori will be at Cinema Village for Q&As after the 7:10 screenings on February 7 & 8.
For forty years, French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann has been documenting the Holocaust and the birth of the state of Israel in such provocative and powerful films as Israel, Why; Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 P.M.; and his nine-and-a-half-hour masterpiece, Shoah. In 1997, he made A Visitor from the Living, built around a 1979 interview with International Red Cross worker Maurice Rossel, who led a delegation inspecting the Nazis’ so-called “model ghetto” of Theresienstadt, which turned out to be a glorified concentration camp. Lanzmann returns to the Czech camp in The Last of the Unjust, an utterly fascinating 218-minute documentary consisting of a series of interviews he conducted in Rome in 1975 with Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, the only Jewish Elder to survive the Holocaust. For years, Murmelstein, who was appointed directly by and reported to Obersturmbannführer Adolph Eichmann, has been declared a Nazi collaborator, by writer Hannah Arendt and many others, even being arrested, imprisoned, and tried by Czech authorities. But in The Last of the Unjust, he paints a vivid portrait of everyday life in Theresienstadt, claiming he was not a collaborator but instead was doing whatever he could to improve conditions for the Jews there.
