this week in film and television

TABU

Miguel Gomes’s award-winning TABU features stories within stories and a curious crocodile

TABU (Miguel Gomes, 2012)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
December 26 – January 8
212-727-8110
www.adoptfilms.net
www.filmforum.org

Portuguese director Miguel Gomes, inspired by F. W. Murnau’s 1931 two-part Tabu and stories related to him by family members in addition to a band featured in his second film, charms and confuses in his third film, the highly unusual and intriguing Tabu. Shot in alluring black-and-white by Rui Poças, the film begins with a captivating, intensely sad tale of lost love narrated by Gomes that takes place prior to the Portuguese Colonial War. That section is followed by the introduction of Pilar (Teresa Madruga), a relatively ordinary, very kind middle-aged woman in modern-day Lisbon who watches out for her elderly neighbor, Aurora (Laura Soveral), a gambling addict who lives with her black maid, Santa (Isabel Cardoso), whom she accuses of performing voodoo on her. As Aurora’s mental and physical health worsens, she sends Pilar and Santa to find a man named Gian Luca Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo), whose recalling of his youthful adventures as a wild, carefree musician (Carloto Cotta) with the beautiful young Aurora (Ana Moreira) takes up the rest of the film. The long flashback, which again returns to a time before the colonial war, is told completely in voice-over, like a silent film with subtitles, the only sound coming from the 1960s music made by the group led by Gian Luca’s best friend, Mário (Manuel Mesquita), and Aurora’s husband (Ivo Müller). (Yes, that song by the pool is actually the Ramones.) Dividing the film into two parts, “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise,” Gomes (The Face You Deserve, Our Beloved Month of August) and cowriter Mariana Ricardo investigate forbidden romance, colonialism, racism, class structure, and haunting memories in stories within stories that give Tabu an atmosphere of mystery and impending doom. Linking it all together is an African crocodile with thoughts of escape. Winner of the FIPRESCI Jury Prize and Alfred Baeur Prize for Artistic Innovation at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival, Tabu is an aural and visual wonder, a uniquely structured film deserving of multiple viewings in order to grasp its full impact, although do not expect all questions to be answered in clear-cut ways.

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI: LA RABBIA DI PASOLINI (THE ANGER OF PASOLINI) / LA RICOTTA

Nino Baragli, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Gastone Ferranti edit the controversial sociopolitical documentary LA RABBIA

LA RABBIA DI PASOLINI (THE ANGER OF PASOLINI) (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1963)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday, December 26, 4:30
Series runs through January 5
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

In 1963, producer Gastone Ferranti asked Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini to make a leftist political documentary about the postwar situation utilizing the producer’s large collection of Mondo Libero newsreel footage, answering the question “Why is our life dominated by discontent, by anguish, by the fear of war, by war?” Not thrilled with the result, he chopped Pasolini’s film in half and hired right-wing demagogue Giovanni Guareschi to create a conservative documentary providing an opposing viewpoint. La rabbia, or The Anger, opened in theaters in Italy and was quickly pulled from release, essentially disappearing until 2005, when a complete color negative was discovered and the two parts were restored and brought back together in a deluxe DVD package. La rabbia di Pasolini (The Anger of Pasolini), which is screening with the amazing La ricotta on December 26 at 4:30 as part of MoMA’s Pasolini career retrospective, is a curious examination of the state of the world. “My idea was to offer a Marxist denunciation of the society and events of the time,” Pasolini explained. Over the course of fifty-four minutes, he and editor Nino Baragli (with Giuseppe Bertolucci handling the recent reconstruction) create a cinematic collage of religion, communism, fascism, socialism, poverty, hunger, colonialism, race, and war through footage of the Hungary revolts of 1956, protests in Rome and Madrid, the war in Algeria, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the rise of Patrice Lumumba in the Belgian Congo, and clips of such other international figures as Lenin, Stalin, Pope John XXIII, Sukarno, Nasser, de Gaulle, Eisenhower, Khrushchev, Yuri Gagarin, and even Marilyn Monroe as he poetically laments about life in the twentieth century. “People of color, it is in hope that man has no color,” one of his narrators says in the film. (The text is recited by actor Giorgio Bassani and painter Renato Guttuso; works by the latter are included in the documentary, along with pieces by Ben Shahn, Jean Fautrier, and George Grosz.) “Long live freedom,” the film repeats, but there’s not much promise for the future.

Pasolini examines the Passion of the Christ and social and religious conditions in Italy in riotous satire LA RICOTTA

LA RICOTTA (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1962-63)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday, December 26, 4:30
Series runs through January 5
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

In 1962, producer Alfredo Bini invited Pier Paolo Pasolini to participate in an omnibus film featuring four shorts, which came to be known as Ro.Go.Pa.G. for the four directors involved, Roberto Rossellini (llibatezza), Jean-Luc Godard (Il Nuovo Mondo), Pasolini, and Ugo Gregoretti (Il Pollo Ruspante). Pasolini contributed the mini-masterpiece La ricotta, a marvelously entertaining satire set around the making of a film about the Passion of the Christ. Mario Cipriani stars as Givoanni Stracci (“Joe Rags”), a goofy, very hungry man who is playing the role of the good thief in the film within a film. As the put-upon Stracci desperately tries to feed his family and get a bite to eat for himself, the director, played by Orson Welles (dubbed by La rabbia narrator Gregorio Bassani), has to deal with a pampered lead actress (Laura Betti), a crew that keeps playing hip 1960s cha-cha music instead of the intended classical score by Scarlatti (Carlo Rustichelli’s soundtrack is mind-blowingly magnificent), and a nosy reporter (Vittorio La Paglia) who wants an interview — which turns into a riotous segment with Welles quoting from Pasolini’s Mamma Roma book. “What do you think of Italian society?” the reporter asks. “The most illiterate masses and the most ignorant bourgeoisie in Europe,” the director replies. Pasolini fills La ricotta with inside jokes, social commentary, and wry humor while he and cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli go from Technicolor biblical epic to black-and-white neo-Realist melodrama to speeded-up Hollywood slapstick comedy. In the film’s introduction, Pasolini says, “I want to state here and now that however La ricotta is taken, the story of the passion, which La ricotta indirectly recalls, is for me the greatest event that has ever happened.” That didn’t stop the government from arresting Pasolini upon the film’s release, charging him with “insulting the religion of the state,” and sentencing him to four months in prison, a verdict that was later overturned on appeal. A small classic that has to be seen to be believed, La ricotta is screening on December 26 as part of a double feature with La rabbia di Pasolini as MoMA’s tribute to the Italian genius continues.

MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO

Hayao Miyazaki’s MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO wonderfully captures the joys and fears of being a child

MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
December 24-27, 11:15 am
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.nausicaa.net

In many ways a precursor to Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece, Spirited Away, the magical My Neighbor Totoro is a fantastical trip down the rabbit hole, a wondrous journey through the sheer glee and universal fears of childhood. With their mother, Yasuko, suffering from an extended illness in the hospital, Satsuki and her younger sister, Mei, move to a new house in a rural farming community with their father, anthropology professor Tatsuo Kusakabe. Kanta, a shy boy who lives nearby, tells them the house is haunted, and indeed the two girls come upon a flurry of black soot sprites scurrying about. Mei also soon discovers a family of totoros, supposedly fictional characters from her storybooks, living in the forest, protected by a giant camphor tree. When the girls fear their mother has taken a turn for the worse, Mei runs off on her own, and it is up to Satsuki to find her. Working with art director Kazuo Oga, Miyazaki paints the film with rich, glorious skies and lush greenery, honoring the beauty and power of nature both visually as well as in the narrative. The scene in which Satsuki and Mei huddle with Totoro at a bus stop in a rainstorm is a treasure. (And just wait till you see Catbus’s glowing eyes.) The movie also celebrates the sense of freedom and adventure that comes with being a child, without helicopter parents and myriad rules suffocating them at home and school. The multi-award-winning My Neighbor Totoro is screening at the IFC Center December 24-27 at 11:15 am in the 2006 rereleased dubbed version, featuring the voices of Dakota Fanning (Satsuki), Elle Fanning (Mei), Lea Salonga (Yasuko), Tim Daly (Tatsuo), and Frank Welker (Totoro and Catbus).

QUAY BROTHERS: ON DECIPHERING THE PHARMACIST’S PRESCRIPTION FOR LIP-READING PUPPETS

Career retrospective offers a dazzling look into the surreal world of the Brothers Quay (still from STREET OF CROCODILES, 1986)

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday–Monday through January 7
Museum admission: $22.50 ($12 can be applied to the purchase of a film ticket within thirty days)
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

When MoMA Film associate curator Ron Magliozzi first approached twins Stephen and Timothy Quay about putting together a career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, the brothers weren’t sure why people would be interested in delving into their history and working process, but they opened their London studio to Magliozzi and helped design the appropriately strange and wonderful exhibit “On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets.” Similar in concept to the “Tim Burton” blockbuster a few years back, the Quay Brothers show is filled with paintings and drawings, film and video, early self-portraiture, photographs, collages, book and album covers, etchings, engravings, commercials, and other fascinating paraphernalia associated with their rather eclectic career, spread across several floors. Born in rural Pennsylvania in 1947 to a machinist father and homemaker mother, the Quays were heavily influenced by illustrator and naturalist Rudolf Freund, whom they met in the late 1960s; Polish poster art from the 1960s, which they saw in a 1967 exhibition at the Philadelphia College of Art; and avant-garde, experimental shorts by Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk.

Quay Brothers, detail, “O Inevitable Fatum, Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, décor,” wood, fabric, glass, metal, 1987 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The MoMA show is set up like a labyrinth, with treats around every corner, from oil snowscapes done when the brothers were still in single digits to short films made when they were in school, from the creepy Black Drawings of the mid-1970s and stage designs for opera, theater, and dance by Béla Bartók, Eugene Ionesco, Molière, Sergei Prokofiev, Georges Feydeau, E. T. A. Hoffman, and others to their British television documentaries, made with longtime producer Keith Griffiths and including the absolutely insane documentary Igor, the Paris Years Chez Pleyel, in which paper cut-outs of Bolshevik poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, French writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, and Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky hang out and do rather odd things in Paris. All of these works lend intrigue and insight to the primary sections of the exhibition, dedicated to the marvelous short films the Quays are renowned for, dark, dazzling stop-motion animations with puppets that relate mesmerizing tales set in a mysterious world of dreams and nightmares that delve into the subconscious. The Quay Brothers’ breakthrough came in 1986 with Street of Crocodiles, adapted from a Bruno Schulz short story, starring eyeless puppets with open heads and taking place in a Kinetoscope, featuring themes and elements that appear in many of their films, including machines, thread, scissors, repetitive movement, screws, bones, metal shavings, and aching, experimental music. Getting its own room, the film is followed by a two-minute outtake that has never been shown before. Among the many other classic Brothers Quay shorts on view in the galleries are In Absentia, The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer, Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, The Sandman, and the dazzling color films This Unnameable Little Broom and The Comb (from the Museums of Sleep). Downstairs outside the Titus Theaters is “Dormitorium,” a terrific collection, previously seen at Parsons the New School for Design in 2009, of film décors, glass-enclosed sets from many of the above-mentioned films as well as many others. And on the first floor by the up escalator you can find “Coffin of a Servant’s Journey,” a short film inside a coffin that can be watched by only one person at a time.

Quay Brothers, “Quay Brothers self-portrait,” photographic enlargement (Atelier Koninck QbfZ)

“On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets” is a magical trip inside the bizarre, surreal world of the Quay Brothers, an exhibition that was a long time coming and has been handled splendidly. It’s also an exhibition that requires a lot of time to be properly enjoyed, so don’t rush through it or you’ll miss so many of its myriad hidden treasures. And as far as the title itself goes, we’ll leave that to the Quays to describe themselves, as they do in the catalog in a faux interview with sixteenth-century composer Heinrich Holtzmüller: “In our mind it’s more of a teasing inducement for a journey. Not a grand journey but a tiny one . . . around the circumference of an apple. We’re no doubt gently abusing the anticipation that the prescriptive side is courting both a rational illegibility as well as an irrational legibility. Hopefully the intrigued will engage with the ambiguity. And besides, the prescription is only mildly inscrutable and one certainly won’t die from it, considering that thousands of people a year reportedly die from misread prescriptions.” You were expecting anything different?

(MoMA will be screening the Quay Brothers’ latest full-length film, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, on January 6-7 in Titus Theater 1, with a live musical score performed by Mikhail Rudy. Also on January 7, “The Essential Shorts, Part 2” will screen six shorts in the Education and Research Building, including Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, Nocturna Artificialia, Ex Voto, This Unnameable Little Broom: Epic of Gilgamesh, Maska, and Bartók Béla: Sonata for Solo Violin.)

CHINESE AND A MOVIE: BACK TO THE FUTURE PARTS I & II

Christoper Lloyd and Michael J. Fox discuss what kind of Chinese food they want in 1955, 1985, and 2015

92YTribeca
200 Hudson St. at Canal St.
Tuesday, December 25, $25-$30, 12:30
212-415-5500
www.92y.org/tribeca

“Okay. Time circuit’s on. Flux capacitor, fluxing. Engine running. All right.” Everything is ready for Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) and Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) to get in that DeLorean, hit eighty-eight miles per hour, and head into either 1955 or 2015 in the first two Back the Future movies, both directed by Robert Zemeckis, who has also given us such other popular films as Romancing the Stone, Forrest Gump, Cast Away, and now Flight. Both flicks, which at one point were going to star Eric Stoltz as Marty and John Lithgow as Doc Brown, are being shown at 92YTribeca’s annual “Chinese and a Movie” Christmas Day party, with the first film screening at 1:00 and the sequel at 3:15. They will be accompanied by a Chinese food buffet beginning at 12:30 and lasting until it is all gone. So come celebrate Christmas with Fox, Lloyd, Crispin Glover as hapless George McFly, Copernicus the dog, Thomas F. Wilson as tough local boy Biff, Lea Thompson as hot MILF Lorraine, and 1.21 gigawatts of electricity that combine with Plutonium to help the protagonists blast off into another time.

THE CLOCK

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday–Monday through January 21
Museum admission: $25 ($12 can be applied to the purchase of a film ticket within thirty days)
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

In 2010, the Whitney presented “Festival,” a thrilling interactive retrospective of the work of Christian Marclay, featuring multiple site-specific installations and live performances. The New York-based multidisciplinary artist followed that up with a supreme work of utter brilliance, the captivating twenty-four-hour video The Clock, which was initially shown at Chelsea’s Paula Cooper Gallery in early 2011 and reprised at the David Rubenstein Atrium as part of the Lincoln Center Festival this past summer. The sensational examination of time is now back for another run in the city, at MoMA through January 21. Screened in a large, dark gallery with three rows of roomy, comfortable couches in the Contemporary Galleries on the second floor, the film unfolds in real time, composed of thousands of clips from movies and television that feature all kinds of clocks and watches showing the minutes ticking away, as well as verbal mentions of the time. Masterfully edited so that it creates its own fluid narrative, The Clock seamlessly cuts from romantic comedies with birds emerging from cuckoo clocks to action films in which protagonists synchronize their watches, from thrillers with characters battling it out in clock towers to dramas with convicted murderers facing execution and sci-fi programs with mad masterminds attempting to freeze time. Marclay mixes in iconic images with excerpts from little-known foreign works, so audiences are kept on the edge of their seats, wondering what will come next, laughing knowingly at recognizable scenes and gawking at strange, unfamiliar bits.

A MoMA visitor wonders just how much longer he’ll have to wait to get in to see Christian Marclay’s THE CLOCK (© Christian Marclay)

Part of the beauty of The Clock is that while time is often central to many of the clips, it is merely incidental in others, someone casually checking their watch or a clock visible in the background, emphasizing how pervasive time is — both on-screen and in real life. Americans spend an enormous amount of time watching movies and television, so The Clock is also a wry though loving commentary on what we choose to do with our leisure time. Although it is not necessarily meant to be viewed in one massive gulp, The Clock will be shown in its entirety January 4-6, 11-14, and 18-20, beginning at 10:30 am Friday and continuing through 5:30 Sunday. Since the film corresponds to the actual time, midnight should offer some fascinating moments, although you might be surprised by just how exciting even three o’clock in the morning can be. But expect huge crowds whenever you go — capacity is 170 (130 sitting, 40 standing, first-come, first-served, and you can stay as long as you want) — so be prepared to do something with all that valuable time spent on line. But wait you should — it’s well worth every second.

SEE IT IN 70MM! IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD

Comedic giants come together for quite a wild ride in Stanley Kramer’s IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD

IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD (Stanley Kramer, 1963)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Saturday, December 22, 2:00, and Friday, December 28, 6:00
Series runs December 21 – January 1
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

They don’t come much crazier than the madcap 1963 comedy It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Producer-director Stanley Kramer takes a sharp turn with the wacky film, clearly needing a laugh following his rather serious string of issue pictures: The Defiant Ones, On the Beach, Inherit the Wind, and Judgment at Nuremberg. As he lays dying after a car crash, master thief Smiler Grogan (Jimmy Durante) tells a group of onlookers that there is $350,000 buried under a “big W” in Santa Rosita State Park. And off they go in search of the prize, willing to do just about anything and everything in order to get their greedy hands on the money. Hot on their trail is police captain T. G. Culpeper (Spencer Tracy), trying to solve one last case before he retires. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World lives up to its title, a mad, mad, mad, mad epic featuring the greatest all-star comedic cast ever assembled, including Sid Caesar, Edie Adams, Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett, an absolutely lunatic Jonathan Winters, Terry-Thomas, Phil Silvers, Dick Shawn, Peter Falk, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, and Ethel Merman in addition to cameos by Jerry Lewis, Jack Benny, Joe E. Brown, Howard Da Silva, Andy Devine, Norman Fell, Selma Diamond, Leo Gorcey, Jim Backus, Marvin Kaplan, Stan Freberg, Arnold Stang, Jesse White, Carl Reiner, Don Knotts, Buster Keaton, and the Three Stooges. Basically, you can’t blink during the film’s 161 minutes or you’ll miss someone or some incredibly silly slapstick moment. And the ending is a laugh riot — literally. It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is screening December 22 and December 28 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “See It in 70MM!,” comprising fifteen films being shown in their original 70mm glory, beginning December 21 with Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and continuing through January 1 with such other works as Ron Fricke’s Baraka, John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn, Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, Basil Dearden’s Khartoum, Richard Brooks’s Lord Jim, and Jacques Tati’s Playtime.