this week in film and television

ALL THAT BREATHES

All That Breathes explores the fate of black kites in India as representative of so much more

ALL THAT BREATHES (Shaunak Sen, 2022)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
212-255-224
quadcinema.com
www.allthatbreathes.com

Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes opens with a long shot of rats scurrying about a filthy New Delhi area, then follows a man carrying four boxes with holes in them into a dingy, crowded basement garage. One starts to rock and falls awkwardly to the floor. The man walks over and takes out an injured bird. As Mohammad Saud, Nadeem Shehzad, and Salik Rehman examine the injured creature, they speak of a possible nuclear war between India and Pakistan.

“What’ll happen to the birds if there’s a nuclear war?” Rehman asks. “We’ll all die. Where will they go?”

A moment later, a young boy searches for a bullet, an announcement from the street advises, “We don’t want any harm to any public property,” and a black kite, a bird of prey that migrates to New Delhi every year, grips a small branch and then accusingly stares directly into the camera. Later street announcements declare, “This is a fight for empathy and unity! The Constitution has to be saved!” regarding the treatment of Islamic citizens.

For several decades, Indian Muslim brothers Saud and Shehzad have been rescuing and healing kites that have fallen from the sky, victim to pollution and the cotton threads of kites that slice their wings. “When we got our first kite . . . I’d stay up at night staring at it,” Shehzad says in voiceover as a lone kite soars in the air, the moon at its left. “It looked like a furious reptile from another planet. It’s said that feeding kites earns ‘sawab’ [religious credit]. When they eat the meat you offer, they eat away your difficulties. And their hunger is insatiable.”

When the brothers were teenage bodybuilders, they encountered their first injured kite. A bird hospital refused to help because the species is not vegetarian, so they used their own knowledge of flesh, muscles, and tendons to repair it. They’ve been rescuing and repairing hurt birds in their highly unsanitary quarters ever since.

Amid the social unrest and their legitimate fears of being turned into refugees because of their religion, Saud and Shehzad continue to fix the birds, as if fixing themselves as they worry about losing their freedom. Over one dinner they discuss with their families what they might do if the government kicks them out of the country. Meanwhile, the brothers are desperate to get a grant to keep their Wildlife Rescue operating.

“I’ve devoted my entire life to this. But this doesn’t feel enough to me,” Shehzad explains. “Things are getting from bad to worse here. Birds are plummeting from the sky. Delhi is a gaping wound. And we’re a tiny Band-Aid on it.”

Cinematographer Ben Bernhard focuses in on nature, from an icy river to an owl to dozens and dozens of kites filling the sky, set to a gentle yet ominous score by Roger Goula. Director and producer Sen (Cities of Sleep) is not just making a film about kites in India; he is accusing the world as a whole of misusing resources in ways that threaten the existence of such living creatures as kites and damage the planet’s ecological system.

“Man is the loneliest animal,” Saud says.

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary (World Cinema) at Sundance and the L’OEil d’or for Best Documentary at Cannes, All That Breathes is now playing at the Quad.

THE TREASURE OF HIS YOUTH: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF PAOLO DI PAOLO

Paolo di Paolo’s photograph of Pier Paolo Pasolini at Monte dei Cocci in 1960 is one of many highlighted in Bruce Weber documentary

THE TREASURE OF HIS YOUTH: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF PAOLO DI PAOLO (Bruce Weber, 2022)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, December 9
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

“The mystery of Paolo di Paolo to me is that he was able to give up photography, something he once had such passion for,” documentarian Bruce Weber says at the beginning of the fabulous The Treasure of His Youth: The Photographs of Paolo di Paolo, a warm and inviting film about one of the greatest photographers you’ve never heard of.

In 1954, Italian philosopher Paolo di Paolo saw a Leica III camera in a shop window and, at the spur of the moment, decided to buy it. That led to fourteen extraordinary years during which the self-taught artist took pictures for Il Mondo and Il Tempo, documenting, primarily in black-and-white, postwar Italy as well as the country’s burgeoning film industry. He was not about glitz and glamour; he captured such figures as Luchino Visconti, Anna Magnani, Ezra Pound, Simone Signoret, Marcello Mastroianni, Charlotte Rampling, Alberto Moravia, Sofia Loren, Giorgio Di Chirico, and others in private moments and glorying in bursts of freedom. He went on a road trip with Pier Paolo Pasolini for a magazine story in which the director would write the words and di Paolo would supply the images. His photos of the society debut of eighteen-year-old Princess Pallavincini are poignant and beautiful, nothing like standard publicity shots.

Paolo di Paolo’s relationship with the camera is revealed in lovely documentary (photo courtesy Little Bear Films)

Then, in 1968, just as suddenly as he picked up the camera, he put it away, frustrated by the growing paparazzi culture and television journalism. A few years ago, Weber and his wife went into a small gallery in Rome where Weber, who has had a “love affair” with Rome since he was ten, discovered magnificent photos of many of his favorite Italian film stars. The gallery owner, Giuseppe Casetti, told him that the pictures were by an aristocratic gentleman he had bumped into at flea markets and who one day came into the bookstore where he was working and gave him one for free, knowing he was a collector. Casetti wanted to know who had taken the photo; “I was once a photographer,” di Paolo told him unassumingly.

That set Weber off on a search to find out everything he could about di Paolo, who is now ninety-seven. Even his daughter, Silvia di Paolo, had no knowledge of her father’s past as a photographer until she found nearly a quarter of a million negatives in the basement of the family home and began organizing them about twenty years ago. Paolo had never spoken of this part of his life; he wrote books on philosophy, was the official historian of the Carabinieri, and restored antique sports cars, but his artistic career was an enigma even though it was when he met his wife, his former assistant.

The father of the bride watches the young couple as they head down a country road (photo by Paolo di Paolo)

Weber follows di Paolo as he meets with photographer Tony Vaccaro, film producer Marina Cigona, and his longtime friend (but not related) Antonio do Paola, visits his childhood home in Larino, is interviewed by the young son of Vogue art director Luca Stoppini, and attends his first-ever retrospective exhibition (“Il Mondo Perduto” at the Maxxi Museum in Rome). And he picks up the camera again, taking photos at a Valentino fashion show.

Cinematographer Theodore Stanley evokes di Paolo’s unpretentious style as he photographs the aristocratic gentleman walking up a narrow cobblestoned street, his cane in his right hand, an umbrella in his left over his head, and driving one of his sports cars. Editor and cowriter Antonio Sánchez intercuts hundreds and hundreds of di Paolo’s photos, several of which are discussed in the film: a spectacular shot of Pasolini at Monte dei Cocci, the director in the foreground, the famous cross atop a hill in the background; Visconti in a chair, fanning himself; a scene in which a father, hands in his pocket, watches his daughter and new son-in-law walking away on an empty country road. There are also clips from such classic films as Rocco and His Brothers, Accatone, Rome Open City, Marriage Italian Style, and 8½. It’s all accompanied by John Leftwich’s epic score.

As Cigona tells di Paolo about having ended his flourishing photography career, “People said, ‘Why did you do that? You were quite famous.’” It was never about the fame for di Paolo, but now the secret is out.

“For me, every object is a miracle,” Pasolini says in an archival interview. In The Treasure of His Youth, Weber (Chop Suey, Let’s Get Lost) treats every moment with di Paolo and his photographs as a miracle. So will you.

BABY DOLL: ACTORS STUDIO SCREENING AND DISCUSSION WITH CARROLL BAKER

Carroll Baker will be at the Actors Studio to discuss the making of Baby Doll

Who: Carroll Baker, Katherine Wallach, Foster Hirsch
What: Film screening and discussion
Where: The Actors Studio, 432 West Forty-Fourth St.
When: Thursday, December 8, free with RSVP, 7:00
Why: The Actors Studio continues celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary with a fabulous special event, a free screening of Elia Kazan’s 1956 drama Baby Doll, followed by a discussion with the one and only Carroll Baker, who portrayed the title character. Adapted by Tennessee Williams from his one-act play 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, the film is set in the Mississippi Delta, where Baby Doll Meighan is about to turn twenty and finally have relations with her significantly older husband, Archie Lee (Karl Malden), much to the chagrin of Archie’s chief rival, Silva Vacarro (Eli Wallach). The steamy movie, which popularized the babydoll nightgown, received four Oscar nominations, including Baker for Best Actress, Mildred Dunnock for Best Supporting Actress, Williams for Best Adapted Screenplay, and Boris Kaufman for Best Black-and-White Cinematography.

The ninety-one-year-old Baker, who also appeared in such works as The Carpetbaggers, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Andy Warhol’s Bad, Star 80, and Ironweed, will be at the Actors Studio on December 8 for the screening and to talk about Baby Doll with Katherine Wallach, the daughter of Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, moderated by Brooklyn College film professor Foster Hirsch. Admission is free with advance RSVP.

TANTURA

Teddy Katz listens to damning audiotapes about a 1948 massacre in Tantura

TANTURA (Alon Schwarz, 2022)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, December 2
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

There’s a deeply disturbing theme that runs through Alon Schwarz’s shocking, must-see documentary, Tantura, about one specific incident during what Palestinians refer to as Al Nakba, “the Catastrophe” that took place during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

In the late 1990s, a graduate student named Teddy Katz researched a possible Israeli army massacre that occurred in the Palestinian village of Tantura. When filmmaker Schwarz interviews members of Israel’s Alexandroni Brigade about it, they smile and laugh as they either flat-out deny that such war crimes happened or basically tell Schwarz, so what if it did?

“In the War of Independence, we knew one simple thing: It’s either me or them,” Amitzur Cohen says. “What would I tell [my wife]? That I was a murderer?” he easily admits with a laugh. “If you killed, you did a good thing,” Hanoch Amit says with a smile. Henio-Tzvi Ben Moshe, head of the Alexandroni Veteran’s Association, lets out a disturbing laugh when he declares, “We’re done with Teddy Katz.”

In the late 1990s, for his master’s thesis at the University of Haifa, Katz interviewed 135 people about the massacre, compiling 140 hours of recordings about the Tantura atrocities, centered around the alleged cold-blooded murder of some two hundred Palestinians whose bodies were then dumped into a mass grave. He received a high grade on the paper, but it was soon submerged in controversy, resulting in a defamation lawsuit and claims that it was all a lie.

“You can take the tapes and listen to them, but if you want to make a movie out of it, be careful, because you’ll be hunted down like I was,” Katz tells Schwarz.

But that warning doesn’t deter Schwarz, who speaks with Alexandroni Brigade vets — who are now in their nineties — university professors, engineers, and Arabs who survived the massacre as he puts together what actually happened at Tantura and how Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion began the cover-up, which is still going on.

“My whole life I thought, and I still think, that the root of the disaster, including the part . . . that can be called the contamination, is 1948,” explains Katz, who was named after Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. “To this day the vast majority of what happened in 1948 is not only hushed up but also destroyed.”

Schwarz intercuts archival footage from the war — in which hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were demolished and some three quarters of a million refugees fled their homes — with scenes from a staged propaganda reenactment and clips of Ben-Gurion and the establishment of the State of Israel. As the evidence mounts, so does the refusal to acknowledge the Catastrophe.

“It’s forbidden to tell. I’m not going to talk about it . . . because . . . it could cause a huge scandal. I don’t want to talk about it,” brigade vet Yossef Diamant says. “That’s it. But it happened; what can you do? It happened. . . . [Katz] told the truth,” he adds with a dismissive laugh.

Casually sitting in a chair outside with a woman on either side of him, Mulik Sternberg proudly says, “The Arabs are an evil, cruel, vindictive enemy, but we were better, in battle. Always. . . . Of course we killed them. We killed them without remorse.” He is clearly unafraid of any possible repercussions.

Mustafa Masri, who lives in Fureidis, where many of the Tantura survivors were relocated, describes seeing the bodies of his murdered father and brother piled on a cart of victims. Professor Yoav Gelber comes right out and says, “I don’t believe witnesses.”

Professor Ilan Pappe puts it all in perspective when he says, “I think the self-image of Israel as a moral society is something I haven’t seen anywhere else in the world. How important it is to be exceptional. We are the Chosen People. This is part of the Israeli self-identification as a very superior moral people. . . . I think it’s very hard for Israelis to admit that they commit war crimes.”

Schwarz is an Israeli-born Jew who worked as a high-tech software entrepreneur before turning to documentaries, making Narco Cultura and Aida’s Secrets with his brother Shaul. Alon, who considers himself “a member of the moderate left side of Israel’s political system,” initially set out to make a film about young human rights activists who are trying to end the 1967 occupation and are labeled by many as traitors — much as Katz is. Schwarz stumbled on Katz’s dilemma by accident.

Documentary seeks to uncover the truth of what happened in Tantura in May 1948

Schwarz is no mere fly on the wall in the film but is actively investigating numerous aspects of the case, putting himself in the story. Tantura is reminiscent of Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012 The Act of Killing and 2014 follow-up, The Look of Silence, as the director confronts the perpetrators of the 1965–66 genocide in Indonesia, who are proud of what they did. It also recalls the 1968 Mỹ Lai massacre led by US Lt. William Calley Jr. in Vietnam.

Katz, who has had three strokes and uses a motorized scooter to get around, is determined to not give up until justice wins out, despite all that’s happened to his career and his family. “You feel like the country is against you,” his wife, Ruth, tells Schwarz. But none of it might matter in the long run.

“What we remember are the good memories,” says Drora Varblovsky, one of four remaining original residents of Kibbutz Nachsholim, which was started in June 1948 on the former site of Tantura.

“Yes, exactly. I have only good memories,” Tereza Carmi adds. “Because I’m fed up with remembering bad things.”

Tantura opens at IFC on December 2, with Schwarz on hand for Q&As after the 7:50 shows on December 2 and 3.

PARIS, TEXAS

Harry Dean Stanton gives a staggering performance as a lost soul in Paris, Texas

PARIS, TEXAS (Wim Wenders, 1984)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
November 25 – December 1
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

Winner of both the Palme d’Or and the Critics Prize at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas is a stirring and provocative road movie about the dissolution of the American family and the death of the American dream. Written by Sam Shepard and adapted by L. M. Kit Carson, the two-and-a-half-hour film opens with a haggard man (Harry Dean Stanton) wandering through a vast, deserted landscape. A close-up of him in his red hat, seen against blue skies and white clouds, evokes the American flag. (Later shots show him looking up at a flag flapping in the breeze, as well as a graffiti depiction of the Statue of Liberty.) After he collapses in a bar in the middle of nowhere, he is soon discovered to be Travis Henderson, a husband and father who has been missing for four years. His brother, Walt (Dean Stockwell), a successful L.A. billboard designer, comes to take him home, but Travis, remaining silent, keeps walking away. He eventually reveals that he is trying to get to Paris, Texas, where he has purchased a plot of land in the desert, but he avoids discussing his past and why he walked out on his wife, Jane (Nastassja Kinski), and son, Hunter (Hunter Carson, the son of L. M. Kit Carson and Karen Black), who is being raised by Walt and his wife, Anne (Aurore Clément). An odd man who is afraid of flying, has a penchant for arranging shoes, and falls asleep at key moments, Travis sets out with Hunter to find Jane and make something out of his lost life.

Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) and Hunter (Hunter Carson) bond while searching for Jane in Wim Wenders road movie

Longtime character actor Stanton (Repo Man, Wise Blood) is brilliant as Travis, his long, craggy face and sad, puppy-dog eyes conveying his troubled soul and buried emotions, his slow, careful gait awash in loneliness and desperation. The scenes between Travis and Jane are a master class in acting and storytelling; Stanton and Kinski (Tess, Cat People) will break your heart over and over again as they face the hardest of truths. Wenders and regular cinematographer Robby Müller use a one-way mirror to absolutely stunning effect in these scenes about what is hidden and what is revealed in a relationship. Wenders had previously made the Road Movie Trilogy of Alice in the Cities, The Wrong Move, and Kings of the Road, which also dealt with difficult family issues, but Paris, Texas takes things to another level. Ry Cooder’s gorgeous slide-guitar soundtrack is like a requiem for the American dream, now a wasteland of emptiness. (Cooder would later make Buena Vista Social Club with Wenders. Another interesting connection is that Wenders’s assistant director was Allison Anders, who would go on to write and direct the indie hit Gas Food Lodging.) A uniquely told family drama, Paris, Texas is rich with deft touches and subtle details, all encapsulated in the final shot. (Don’t miss what it says on that highway billboard.)

STEVE MARTIN, HARRY BLISS, AND NATHAN LANE: NUMBER ONE IS WALKING

Who: Steve Martin, Harry Bliss, Nathan Lane
What: Book launch
Where: The Town Hall, 123 West Forty-Third St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
When: Tuesday, November 15, $68, 8:00
Why: Multihyphenate Steve Martin has made films and records and written plays, movie scripts, novels, children’s books, and tongue-in-cheek self-help tomes. He has now entered the graphic novel field with Number One Is Walking: My Life in the Movies and Other Diversions (Celadon, November 15, $30), with the help of black-and-white illustrations by cartoonist Harry Bliss. A follow-up to their 2020 cartoon collection A Wealth of Pigeons, the new book features scenes in which Martin looks back at his career for the first time in print. The title comes from a Hollywood trope; in one panel, Martin explains, “On a movie call sheet, the actors are listed numerically. The lead is number one, the second lead is number two, etc. I was slightly embarrassed on my first film, The Jerk, when I would head toward the set and the assistant director would trail me, transmitting into his walkie talkie . . . ‘Number one is walking.’” Martin points out that he was also “number one” on Bowfinger, Cheaper by the Dozen, and Bringing Down the House, but when he did Nancy Meyers’s It’s Complicated with Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin, each time he came on set he was horrified to hear: “Number three is walking.”

Longtime New Yorker cartoonist Bliss has illustrated such books as Joanna Cotler’s Sorry (Really Sorry), Doreen Cronin’s Diary of a Worm, and Alison McGhee’s Countdown to Kindergarten as well as writing and illustrating Bailey and Luke on the Loose. On November 15 at 8:00, Martin and Bliss will be at the Town Hall to discuss their collaboration; serving as moderator will be the one and only Nathan Lane, who appears with Martin in Only Murders in the Building. All audience members will receive a signed copy of Number One Is Walking: My Life in the Movies and Other Diversions, courtesy of the Strand.

BLACK NOTEBOOKS: RONIT

Shlomi Elkabetz documents the making of Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem with his sister, Ronit

BLACK NOTEBOOKS: RONIT (CAHIERS NOIRS: RONIT) (Shlomi Elkabetz, 2021)
New Plaza Cinema @Macaulay Honors College
35 West Sixty-Seventh St. between Central Park West & Columbus Ave.
Opens Friday, November 11
panoramafilmsus.com
newplazacinema.org

About halfway through his award-winning documentary Black Notebooks: Ronit, director Shlomi Elkabetz says in a gentle voice-over, “And so it happened. And I just observe. The parting and final conversations, and last words, if there were any, passed us by, like in a film, above and beneath life, and silence in life is the same as the silence of death.”

Shlomi is talking about his relationship with his sister, Israeli film star Ronit Elkabetz, who can be heard saying, “It’s over.” Shlomi, pensively looking out a window, turns to face the camera and continues, “And the same silences are still there. You and I still speak.” Shlomi then switches to a close-up of Ronit as he concludes, “And we never parted.” He next cuts back and forth between his and his sister’s faces before he gets up and walks away, then shows Ronit sitting by herself at a table with an empty chair.

The companion piece to Black Notebooks: Viviane, Black Notebooks: Ronit is a powerful and often uncomfortably intimate behind-the-scenes story about the making and marketing of the 2014 film Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, the final work of a trilogy that began with To Take a Wife and Shiva. The three films were cowritten and codirected by the siblings and star Ronit (Late Marriage, The Band’s Visit) as the unhappily married Viviane Amsalem. In Gett, Viviane has filed for divorce in a religious court, the three-man beit din, seeking to obtain a gett, which will grant her freedom from her husband (Simon Abkarian), who refuses to let her go.

Fighting the lung cancer that will eventually kill her in 2016 at the age of fifty-one, Ronit is having difficulty with the movie. She forgets her lines and prefers to spend time with her two young children rather than do yet another take of a scene. “I can’t stand being so exposed anymore,” she tells her brother, explaining that she has lost her desire to act. But Shlomi is determined to finish the film, helping Ronit do the work any way he can, bringing family to visit the set, feeding her dialogue, and giving her extra time between shots. Her costar Menashe Noy, who plays her advocate, Carmel Ben-Tovim, watches her closely, not always sure what to do.

At one point, on the media tour supporting Gett, Ronit is standing in front of a mirror as Shlomi, visible in the reflection, films her with a small handheld camera. “Why not give an interview? Am I afraid? Yes, I’m afraid,” she says. “And I don’t want my fear to run my life. I don’t want that to happen; right away I say to myself: Okay, I don’t want to cooperate with fear.” Through it all, Shlomi holds the camera at chest level as he gazes at his sister, neither looking through the lens nor worrying about the angle. Duality, mirroring, and life versus the depiction of life are the inescapable themes.

“We’ll do the most amazing things, despite and because of the limitations!” Ronit tells her brother, although it’s clear that it won’t be easy. As Ronit becomes sicker, Shlomi grows more poetic, but neither will give up the fight.

Directed by Shlomi and cowritten with frequent collaborator Joelle Alexis, Black Notebooks: Ronit does a beautiful job of paralleling Viviane’s battle to obtain a gett with Ronit’s real-life struggle against cancer. When one of the beit din judges says to her, “Accept your fate. There’s nothing more I can do,” Ronit, as Viviane, shakes her head and covers her face with her hands, a reaction that could be Ronit being given a fatal diagnosis. The audience roots for both women, fictional and real; one melds into the other, lending a hybrid nature to the storytelling.

When Shlomi speaks of casting Noy, he points out, “Here, Menashe plays Carmel Ben-Tovim, who tries to save Viviane. And what I see is myself fighting alongside you. And now, when I look at the two of you” — Shlomi cuts to a shot of Noy looking over at a solemn yet steadfast Viviane — “I see me and you. But when I try to plead for you . . . It’s too much for me.” It’s almost too much for us as well, especially with the sweeping melodramatic score, featuring original music by Dikla and Yiftach Shahaf in addition to the Israel Symphony Orchestra performing Bernard Herrmann’s “Vertigo: Suite,” from the Alfred Hitchcock film in which Kim Novak plays two different women whom Jimmy Stewart’s character tries to make the same.

Winner of the Israeli Ophir Award for Best Documentary, Black Notebooks: Ronit opens November 11 at New Plaza Cinema, with Shlomi Elkabetz participating in Q&As on November 11 at the 7:45 show with American actor John Turturro (Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink), on November 12 at the 7:30 screening with American novelist Nicole Krauss (Forest Dark, The History of Love), and on November 13 at the 4:30 show with Israeli actress Mili Avital (Dead Man, Prisoners of War).