this week in film and television

IDOLATROUS PROCESSIONS, PROVOCATIONS, DEMIURGIC NERVATURES, AND DISTANT PRESENCES: THE QUAY BROTHERS RETURN WITH SANATORIUM

The Quay Brothers return to Film Forum with their first feature-length film in twenty years, another foray into the unknown and unseen

SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS (the Quay Brothers, 2024)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, August 29
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

As if a new film from the Quay Brothers is not already reason enough to celebrate, the rejoicing can escalate because their latest, Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, is another masterful addition to their forty-year career.

Philadelphia-born, England-based identical twins Stephen and Timothy Quay make unique, complex stop-motion animated works that incorporate elements of German expressionism, silent film tropes, noir, and psychoanalysis, creating dark, heavily atmospheric tales that push the boundaries of storytelling conventions, using eerie, fragile dolls and puppets along with mysterious live action and spectral experimental music. They started out in 1985 with the eleven-minute Little Songs of the Chief Officer of Hunar Louse, or This Unnameable Little Broom, Being a Largely Disguised Reduction of the Epic of Gilgamesh, Tableau II, a dreamlike fantasia involving a creepy, clownlike figure surrounded by doors and drawers that open and close by themselves and windows that offer views into other worlds. They followed that up with the 1986 classic Street of Crocodiles, based on Bruno Schulz’s 1934 short story collection and inspired by the work of Czech filmmaker, artist, and playwright Jan Švankmajer; the twenty-minute opus revolutionized the genre, focusing on a man, dressed like a magician, who looks into a strange contraption that leads him into a portentous alternate universe where inanimate objects move and clocks have no hands.

Only their third feature-length film — after 1994’s Institute Benjamenta and 2004’s The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes — Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, based on the 1937 novel and other writings by Schulz, is a natural progression from those early days, a kind of summation of everything that came before it. The narrative is set at Sanatorium Karpaty in the foothills of the Karpathian Mountains, where patient J (Zenaida Yanowsky) is convalescing. We first meet Adela I (Allison Bell), a young woman peering around suspiciously, her knee blocking part of her face as we listen to a scratchy 1936 Radio Archive recording of a voice explaining, “Sometimes, at the opening . . . of a street someone turned to the sky half a face, with one frightened and shining eye, and listened to the rumble of space.” Next we see, through the pupil in a large, disembodied eye, three men in top hats, two chimneysweeps (Andrzej Kłak and Leszek Bzdyl) and an auctioneer (Tadeusz Janiszewski). The auctioneer is selling such unusual items as “Twin Quail eggs of supernatural size, laid during the Solar Eclipse . . . of 12 May 1706? Or three petrified ribs of a Siren . . . together with her hands found in the Royal Menagerie of Fredensborg . . . in the year 27 September 1674. Or an Iron Harpoon . . . struck by lightning! Or the Warm Blood of Bees! Or the Hour of your Death!”

Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass is another audiovisual marvel by the Brothers Quay

The auctioneer, who also refers to himself as a flogger and a pedlar, returns to his sparse office, where his assistant (Wioletta Kopańska) shows him a new item that has been delivered for him to sell; in his booming thespian voice, he reads: “Forbiddingly called Maquette for the Sepulchre of a Dead Retina, it is a singularly decrepit but ornate wooden box having the appearance of a miniature funerary cabinet with a skilfully hidden secret drawer allegedly containing the deceased retina of its original owner. Penetrating the exterior skin of this box are seven randomly placed lenses with tiny adjustable screws. Each lens holds a glimpse of one of the seven final images that the said eye beheld. And when positioned correctly, once a year, on the 19th of November, the sun’s rays are aligned to strike the dead retina — thereby liquefying it, anointing each of the seven images and setting them in motion.”

The box suddenly comes to life, and the auctioneer peers into one of the lenses and sees Józef, a doll in a top hat who wanders through an old, ghostly train, going from coach to coach as doors and secret entrances swing open and closed and ghastly figures appear and disappear. In voiceover, the auctioneer narrates the proceedings as Józef meets the multiarmed Dr. Gotard, who is caring for Józef’s ailing father. Józef encounters a broken hourglass, a dilapidated bridge, a buzzing neon sign in red and blue, used chalk for hire, and old mirrors as he makes his way through netherworld vestibules.

The story occasionally cuts back to live action with real actors, where Józef (Kłak) is told by the chambermaid (Kopańska) that it is always night there. He peers through a keyhole and watches what might be some kind of S&M encounter, bathed in a golden light. A horde of men (Bzdyl, Robert Martyniak, Łukasz Łucjan, Marek Jasek) are tantalized by Adela II (Kopańska). Back in his doll form, Józef is led to a crumbling theater for one person; his seat is Loge 7A, which is restricted view.

It all combines for a storytelling tour de force, zeroing in on the voyeuristic nature of humanity, from how we watch movies and theater to how we interact with one another in real life and fantasy.

Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass unfolds in seven sections, including “Provocations Found in Evening Corridors: Hosanna!,” “Distant Presences Traced Around the Circumference of a Knee,” “The Idolatrous Procession,” and “Travels in the Last World.” It’s a Victorian steampunk dark nightmare that is like an ASMR fan’s dream. The attention to detail in every shot, every sound is remarkable, resulting in a hypnotic audiovisual experience. The Quays are credited with the puppets, décors, animation, and cinematography; the spectacular production design is by Agata Trojak, with sets by Anna Podhajny, props by Mateusz Niedzielak, costumes by Dorothée Roqueplo, live-action cinematography by Bartosz Bieniek, and sound by Joakim Sundström and the Quays.

Timothy Nelson’s original score features electronic noise, propulsive drumming, and spectral tones, accompanied by additional music by Alfred Schnittke performed by the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra. The methods employed by the Brothers Quay are so dazzling that their mind-blowing sets were on display in the fall 2009 exhibit “Dormitorium: Film Décors by the Quay Brothers” at Parsons the New School for Design, and they were honored with the wide-ranging 2012–13 MoMA retrospective “Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets.”

Not even the most serious students of Freud and Jung will make sense of everything as the film investigates concepts of time and space, of life and death in ways that both chill and thrill. (In their director comments, the Quays call Sanatorium “an exploration of motifs and themes taken from the mytho-poetic writings of Bruno Schulz integrating both puppets and live-action to score the demiurgic nervature of Schulz’s 13th apocryphal month in the Regions of the Great Heresy.”) As they have done in This Unnameable Little Broom, Street of Crocodiles, and such other shorts as The Comb, The Phantom Museum: Random Forays into the Vaults of Sir Henry Wellcome’s Medical Collection, Metamorphosis, Through the Weeping Glass: On the Consolations of Life Everlasting (Limbos & Afterbreezes in the Mütter Museum), and The Doll’s Breath — some of which are documentaries — they invite viewers into fantastical, unimaginable realms and dimensions that are as confounding as they are beautiful, as unnerving as they are intensely involving and satisfying.

Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass opens August 29 at Film Forum; each screening will be preceded by a specially recorded introduction by the Quay Brothers. The 6:10 show on Friday will be introduced by Literary Hub editor Olivia Rutigliano.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

THE SITE WHERE IT HAPPENED: HAMILTON SING-A-LONG AT THE OLD STONE HOUSE

Fans can sing along to the Hamilton movie at the place where the Battle of Brooklyn happened

HAMILTON SING-A-LONG
Old Stone House & Washington Park
336 Third St., Brooklyn
Thursday, August 14, free with RSVP, 7:30
theoldstonehouse.org

Every summer, the Old Stone House commemorates the August 27, 1776, Battle of Brooklyn, the first military engagement following the signing of the Declaration of Independence on August 2 at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. This year the historic site will be hosting “Revolutionary Brooklyn,” including walking tours, a short theatrical farce, a remembrance ceremony, a Constitution handwriting session, and a screening of the 2020 film Hamilton, a live stage recording of the smash 2015 Broadway musical that won eleven Tony Awards and is still running at the Richard Rodgers Theatre.

Directed by Thomas Kail and written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, the film features Miranda as Alexander Hamilton, Leslie Odom Jr. as Aaron Burr, Phillipa Soo as Eliza Hamilton, Renée Elise Goldsberry as Angelica Schuyler, Christopher Jackson as George Washington, Daveed Diggs as Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson, Anthony Ramos as John Laurens and Philip Hamilton, Okieriete Onaodowan as Hercules Mulligan and James Madison, and Jonathan Groff as King George III. On August 14 at 7:30, fans can come to Washington Park and sing along to such favorite numbers as “My Shot,” “Non-Stop,” and “The Room Where It Happens.” Attendees can bring their own lawn chair or blanket and party on the exact place where the Battle of Brooklyn happened 249 years ago; admission is free with advance RSVP.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

TIME IS ON HIS SIDE: CELEBRATING OLIVIER ASSAYAS AT METROGRAPH

OLIVIER ASSAYAS: OUT OF TIME
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Series begins August 8
metrograph.com

In conjunction with the theatrical release of his latest film, the semiautobiographical Suspended Time, Metrograph will be screening a half-dozen of French writer-director Olivier Assayas’s works, which range from ultracool flicks to boring dramas, but they’re almost always visually stunning, filled with cinematic references and hip music — as well as such stars as Juliette Binoche, Kristen Stewart, Mathieu Amalric, Maggie Cheung, and future director Mia Hansen-Løve, who was Assayas’s partner for fifteen years. The series kicks off August 8 with a sneak preview of the new film in addition to 2018’s Non-Fiction and continues with such other tales as 1998’s Late August, Early September and 2000’s Les Destinées sentimentales.

Metrograph is celebrating the work of Olivier Assayas in retrospective including Summer Hours

SUMMER HOURS (L’HEURE D’ÉTÉ) (Olivier Assayas, 2008)
Friday, August 15, 6:15
Sunday, August 17, 5:35
metrograph.com
www.summerhours.com.au

At their annual family gathering, Frédéric (Charles Berling), Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), and Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) are celebrating their mother’s seventy-fifth birthday. But Hélène (Edith Scob) does not care about the present; instead, she is more concerned with preserving the past and preparing for the future. She pulls aside her oldest, Frédéric (Assayas’s on-screen alter ego), to tell him what to do with her belongings after she’s gone, but he is not ready to think about that. Her house is more like a museum, filled with valuable works of art and furniture that were collected by her uncle, a famous painter who died thirty years before. Frédéric would prefer to keep the house intact, donating a few items to the Musee d’Orsay and saving the rest for the next generation, but Adrienne and Jérémie don’t necessarily feel the same way, and Frédéric’s and Jérémie’s kids fail to see any value in the pieces, including two oil paintings by Camille Corot, begrudgingly noting that they’re from a different era. While Frédéric, a professor who has written a controversial book about the state of the economy, attaches personal memories to each object, Adrienne, a successful designer in New York, is more interested in the functionality of things, and Jérémie, who manages a company that profits from cheap labor in China, sees only monetary value. As the three siblings discuss what to do with their mother’s estate, relationships come into focus, and a long-held secret emerges.

Written and directed by Olivier Assayas (Clean, Demonlover), Summer Hours, which was selected for the 2008 New York Film Festival, is a thoughtful, intelligent slice-of-life story that avoids overbearing cliches and melodramatic moments; there are no blow-ups or overemotional scenes. Instead, the family deals with its situation directly and matter-of-factly, a sort of French Cherry Orchard for the twenty-first century. However, Assayas does include far too many red herrings, little flourishes of cinematic language that seem to set something up that never comes full circle. The project was initiated by the Musee d’Orsay, which had commissioned a group of international directors to make short films related to the institution’s holdings. Assayas’s friend and colleague Hou Hsiao Hsien ended up making the full-length Flight of the Red Balloon, which also starred Binoche. Although the project later fell apart, Assayas combined the idea with the worsening condition of his mother, resulting in a bittersweet and very personal work.

Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart mix fact and fiction in Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria

CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA (Olivier Assayas, 2014)
Friday, August 15, 8:15
Saturday, August 16, 5:25
metrograph.com

The related concepts of time and reality wind through Olivier Assayas’s beautifully poetic, melancholy Clouds of Sils Maria much like actual snakelike clouds slither through the twisting Maloja Pass in the Swiss Alps, as life imitates art and vice versa. Juliette Binoche stars as Maria Enders, a famous French actress who is on her way to Zurich to accept an award for her mentor, playwright Wilhelm Melchior, who eschews such mundane ceremonies. But while en route, Maria and her personal assistant, the extremely attentive and capable Valentine (Kristen Stewart), learn that Wilhelm has suddenly and unexpectedly passed away, and Maria considers turning back, especially when she later finds out that Henryk Wald (Hanns Zischler), an old nemesis, will be there to pay homage to Wilhelm as well, but she decides to go ahead after all. At a cocktail party, Maria meets with hot director Klaus Diesterweg (Lars Eidinger), who is preparing a new stage production of Wilhelm and Maria’s first big hit, The Maloja Snake, but this time Maria would play Helena, an older woman obsessed with ambitious eighteen-year-old Sigrid, the role she originally performed twenty years earlier, to great acclaim. Klaus is planning to cast Lindsay Lohan-like troublemaking star and walking tabloid headline Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz) as Sigrid, which does not thrill Maria as her past and present meld together in an almost dreamlike narrative punctuated by the music of Handel and cinematographer Yorick Le Saux’s gorgeous shots of vast mountain landscapes.

Valentine (Kristen Stewart) and Maria (Juliette Binoche) go in search of the Maloja Snake in the Swiss Alps

Clouds of Sils Maria resonates on many levels, both inside and outside of the main plot and the film itself. Assayas (Boarding Gate, Something in the Air) cowrote André Téchiné’s 1983 film, Rendez-Vous, which was Binoche’s breakthrough; Assayas and Binoche wouldn’t work together again until his 2008 film Summer Hours, similar to the relationship between Wilhelm and Maria. Meanwhile, the story of the play-within-the-film is echoed by the relationship between Maria and Valentine, who are having trouble separating the personal from the professional. It is often difficult to know when the two women are practicing lines and when they are talking about their “real” lives. Binoche (Blue, Caché) is simply extraordinary as Maria, a distressed and anxious woman who is suddenly facing getting older somewhat sooner than expected, while Stewart (The Twilight Saga, On the Road) became the first American woman to win a French César, for Best Supporting Actress, for her sensitive portrayal of Valentine, a strong-willed young woman who might or might not be holding something back. The scenes between the two are riveting as they venture in and out of the reality of the film, their onscreen chemistry building and building till it’s at last ready to ignite. Art, life, cinema, theater, fiction, and reality all come together in Clouds of Sils Maria, as Maria, Assayas, and Binoche take stock of where they’ve been, where they are, and where they’re going.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

FREEDOM FROM THE YOKE OF LANGUAGE: THE MUSICIANS

Astrid (Valérie Donzelli) is determined to stage a special one-of-a-kind concert in The Musicians

THE MUSICIANS (LES MUSICIENS) (Grégory Magne, 2024)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, August 8
212-529-6799
www.cinemavillage.com
www.outsiderpictures.us

“Music is alive. To play it, you need to live it,” composer Charlie Beaumont (Frédéric Pierrot) says in Grégory Magne’s beautiful French comedy-drama The Musicians, a cinematic symphony not just for classical music lovers.

The film opens with a pan of what appears to be a regular-size interior wooden room but turns out to be the inside of a cello, soon confirmed by luthier François (François Ettori) to be the cherished Stradivarius San Domenico, which is up for auction. Determined to carry out her deceased father’s longtime wish, Astrid Carlson (Valérie Donzelli) wants to acquire the instrument to add to the two Stradivarius violins (including the 1713 Wodyka) and viola the family already owns and organize a concert in which four of the best musicians in the world will perform a specially commissioned piece as a kind of one-time-only string quartet supergroup, to be broadcast live around the world from a relatively undistinguished church chosen by her father. Her brother (Nicolas Bridet) is against it from the start, claiming the foundation cannot afford the cello and should instead be selling off the other three instruments, but Astrid won’t take no for an answer.

She pursues violinist George Massaro (Mathieu Spinosi), a lone wolf who plays by his own rules; blind second violinist Peter Nicolescu (Daniel Garlitsky) and cellist Lise Carvalho (Marie Vialle), who have a past that might prevent them from teaming up; and violist Apolline Dessartre (Emma Ravier), a sexy young social media starlet. The four instruments may have been made from the same tree, but that doesn’t mean it will be easy for Astrid to get the musicians on the same page. Things go so poorly at first that she tries to enlist Charlie for help; the reclusive, dour composer is initially not interested but eventually comes around, although he has his doubts from the start that this is a good idea.

A temporary classical supergroup faces professional and personal challenges in symphonic film

Although the four musicians are exceptional, the concert is primarily about the Stradivari. At one point, when the quartet is off to a rehearsal, Charlie is surprised to see a motorcade pulling away. “A car for each musician . . . Quite a heavy carbon footprint,” he says. Astrid responds, “They can’t travel together. Request from the insurance companies.” Charlie ponders, “Just like royalty. Two heirs should never fly on the same flight.” To which Astrid clarifies, “I meant the instruments.”

Over the course of one week before the concert, egos clash and tempers explode, making it seem like this impossible performance might indeed be impossible.

The Musicians features a marvelous original score by Grégoire Hetzel, who has composed music for films by Arnaud Desplechin, Mathieu Amalric, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, cowrote the opera La Chute de Fukuyama, and penned the novel Le Vert Paradis. The soundtrack is supplemented with pieces by Mozart, Bach, Fauré, and Lead Belly.

French actress, director, and screenwriter Donzelli (Martha . . . Martha, The Queen of Hearts) is tender and vulnerable as Astrid, the emotional center of the narrative; everything is seen through her eyes. But César-nominated French film, television, and theater star Pierrot is sensational as Charlie, a deeply conflicted man who is uncomfortable in his own skin. “I started making music to free myself . . . from the yoke of language,” he says poetically even as he appears trapped. (His character is perhaps named after jazz saxophonist Charlie Beaumont, as Pierrot is a jazz aficionado who plays the clarinet, and there are elements of jazz in the way Charlie approaches his music.)

Moscow-born violinist and pianist Garlitsky (Paul and Paulette Take a Bath, Chez Maupassant), French equestrian, mezzo-soprano, and violinist Ravier (Two Sons, A Private Life), French violinist Spinosi (La Mélodie, Les Souvenirs), and French theater director Vialle (Julie est amoureuse, La parenthèse enchantée) form a wonderful, fully believable foursome, each of them a classically trained musician in real life; the youngest of the group, Ravier, is in fact active on social media, posting photos of herself in a bikini, just like her character does in the movie, upsetting the more private George.

Magne (Vingt-quatre heures par jour de mer, Perfumes) conducts the proceedings with expert precision, using his experience making fiction films and documentaries to give the film a naturalistic air. Lovingly photographed by Pierre Cottereau and intricately edited by Béatrice Herminie with exquisite sound design by Nicolas Cantin, Daniel Sobrino, Fanny Martin, and Olivier Goinard, The Musicians is a mellifluous, affectionate, sweet-natured tale that encourages audiences to free themselves from the ever-present yoke of language.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

LEGACY, MEMORY, AND IMPERMANENCE: CELEBRATING MEREDITH MONK AT IFC

Meredith Monk looks at her past, present, and future in Billy Shebar’s celebratory and deeply affecting documentary

MONK IN PIECES: A CONCEPT ALBUM (Billy Shebar, 2025)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
July 24–31
www.ifccenter.com
monkinpieces.com

Near the beginning of Billy Shebar’s revelatory documentary, Monk in Pieces, composer Philip Glass explains that Meredith Monk “was a self-contained theater company. She, amongst all of us, I think, was the uniquely gifted one — is the uniquely gifted one.” It’s an important correction because Monk, at eighty-three, is still hard at work, creating live performances and films that defy categorization.

While several of her earliest projects were met with derision in critical circles, today she is revered for her remarkable output, although it is still impossible to put her into any kind of box. At one point in the documentary, a chorus of Monk scholars sings her praises; one says, “She’s achieved so much, has received so many accolades, and yet she’s this unknown,” a second notes, “She kind of falls through the cracks of music history,” and a third admits, “We don’t know how to talk about her.”

Written, directed, and produced by Shebar — whose wife, coproducer Katie Geissinger, has been performing with Monk since 1990 — and David Roberts, Monk in Pieces does a wonderful job of righting those wrongs, celebrating her artistic legacy while she shares private elements of her personal and professional life. Born and raised in Manhattan, Monk details her vision problem, known as strabismus, in which she is unable to see out of both eyes simultaneously in three dimensions, which led her to concentrate on vocals and the movement of her physical self. She studied Dalcroze Eurhythmics: “All musical ideas come from the body; I think that’s where I’m coming from,” she says. All these decades later, her distinctive choreography and wordless tunes are still like nothing anyone else does.

Meredith Monk shares a special moment with her beloved turtle, Neutron

Unfolding at a Monk-like unhurried pace, the ninety-five-minute documentary is divided into thematic chapters based on her songs, including “Dolmen Music,” “Double Fiesta,” “Memory Song,” “Turtle Dreams,” and “Teeth Song,” while exploring such presentations as Juice (1969), the first theatrical event to be held at the Guggenheim; Education of the Girlchild (1973), in which a woman ages in reverse; Quarry (1976), a three-part opera about an American child sick in bed during WWII; Impermanence (2006), inspired by the sudden death of her partner, Mieke von Hook; and her masterwork, Atlas (1991), in which the Houston Grand Opera worries about her numerous requests and production costs, whether the piece will be ready in time, and if it even can be considered opera. There are also clips from Ellis Island, Book of Days, Facing North, and Indra’s Net, her latest show, which was staged at Park Ave. Armory last fall. In addition, Monk reads from her journals in scenes with playful animation by Paul Barritt.

Monk opened up her archives for the filmmakers, so Shebar, Roberts, and editor Sabine Krayenbühl incorporate marvelous photos and video from throughout Monk’s career, along with old and new interviews. “It was her voice that was so extraordinary, not only the different kind of sounds she could make, but the imagination she was using in producing the sound . . . totally individual,” Merce Cunningham says. WNYC New Sounds host John Schaefer gushes, “I don’t know when words like multimedia and interdisciplinary began to become in vogue, but Meredith was all of those things.” Her longtime friend and collaborator Ping Chong offers, “She had to fight to be acknowledged in the performing arts world because critics were saying that what she was doing was nonsensical, was crazy, was not serious; in a way, it’s a fight to survive. Pain is where art comes from. . . . Art has to come out of need. And now she’s an old master.”

And Björk, who recorded Monk’s “Gotham Lullaby,” touts, “Meredith’s melody making is like a timeless door that’s opened, like a gateway to the ancient is found. It definitely affected my DNA. . . . Her loft that she has lived in for half a century is an oasis in a toxic environment.” Among the other collaborators who chime in are longtime company member Lanny Harrison; composer Julia Wolfe; and David Byrne, for whom she created the opening scene of his 1986 film, True Stories, and who says he learned from Monk that “you can do things without words and it still has meaning, it still has an emotional connection.”

Some of the most beautiful moments of the film transpire in Monk’s loft, where she tends to her beloved forty-two-year-old turtle named Neutron, puts stuffed animals on her bed, meditates while staring at windows lined with Tibetan prayer flags, composes a new song, looks into a mirror as she braids her trademark pigtails, and sits at her small kitchen table, eating by herself. Surrounded by plants and personal photographs, she moves about slowly, profoundly alone, comfortable in who she is and what she has accomplished, contemplating what comes next.

“What happens when I’m not here anymore?” Monk, who received the 2014 National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama, asks while working with director Yuval Sharon, conductor Francisco J. Núñez, and performer Joanna Lynn Jacobs on a remounting of Atlas for the LA Philharmonic in 2019. “It’s very rare that anybody gets it.”

Monk in Pieces goes a long way toward rectifying that, filling in the cracks, helping define her place in music history.

Monk in Pieces runs July 24-31 at IFC Center; there will be Q&As following the 6:45 screenings on July 24 with Monk, Shebar, and producer Susan Margolin, moderated by Schaefer; on July 25 with Monk, Shebar, and Margolin, moderated by violist Nadia Sirota; and on July 26 with Shebar.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

WAVING THE FLAG: ARTIST’S CHOICE AT CHELSEA FOUNDATION

Mark Hogancamp tries to rebuild his life in a carefully constructed alternate reality (photo by Tom Putnam)

ARTIST’S CHOICE: MOVIE NIGHTS
The FLAG Art Foundation
545 West 25th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
Wednesday, July 23, July 30, August 6, free with advance RSVP, 7:00
www.flagartfoundation.org

For the next three Wednesdays, the FLAG Art Foundation is hosting free screenings of works handpicked by three artists, films that have been meaningful to them in their life and artistic practice. The series begins July 23 with Jeff Malmberg’s Marwencol, selected by New York City–born, Jersey City–based Ana Benaroya, who explores the human body and aspects of herself in colorful characters in manic situations. For July 30, LA-based Ethiopian-American multidisciplinary artist Awol Erizku has chosen three of the most important and influential indie films ever made, Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s Meshes of the Afternoon, Chris Marker’s La Jetée, and Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl. The program concludes August 6 with short films picked by Baltimore-born painter, writer, and musician Cynthia Daignault.

MARWENCOL (Jeff Malmberg, 2010)
Wednesday, July 23, free with advance RSVP, 7:00
www.flagartfoundation.org
www.marwencol.com

Named Best Documentary at numerous film festivals across the country, Marwencol offers a surprising look inside the creative process and the fine line that exists between art and reality. On April 8, 2000, Mark Hogancamp was nearly beaten to death outside a bar in his hometown of Kingston, New York. He spent nine days in a coma and more than a month in the hospital before being released, suffering severe brain damage that has left his memory a blur. To help put his life back together, he began using toys and dolls — Barbies, celebrity replicas, army men — to re-create his personal journey. He makes dolls of his friends and relatives, the people he works with, and others, constructing an alternate WWII-era universe he calls Marwencol, complete with numerous buildings and plenty of Nazis. He captures the detailed story in photographs that are not only fascinating to look at but that also help him figure out who he was and who he can be.

This miniature three-dimensional world is reminiscent of the two-dimensional one carefully fashioned by outsider artist Henry Darger in his fifteen-thousand-page manuscript, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, which also features an alternate reality involving military battles set amid stunning artwork. Director, producer, and editor Jeff Malmberg makes no judgments about Hogancamp, and asks the same of the audience. In his first full-length film, Malmberg shares the compelling story of a deeply troubled, flawed man suddenly forced to begin again, using art and creativity to bring himself back to life. He speaks with Hogancamp’s mother, his old roommate, the prosecutor who handled his case, and others who are first seen proudly holding the doll Hogancamp made of them. And Malmberg doesn’t turn away from the more frightening aspects of Hogancamp’s daily existence. Marwencol is an unforgettable portrait of lost identity and the long road to redemption.

Chris Marker’s La Jetée is a postapocalyptic thriller about movies and memory, told almost exclusively through still images

LA JETÉE (Chris Marker, 1962) / MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, 1943) / BLACK GIRL (LA NOIRE DE . . .) (Ousmane Sembène, 1966)
Wednesday, July 30, free with advance RSVP, 7:00
www.flagartfoundation.org

The Flag series continues with an inspired trio of wildly different low-budget, black-and-white works that experiment with the language of cinema. Chris Marker’s La Jetée is a nearly half-hour postapocalyptic dystopian thriller set in a world that calls “past and future to the rescue of the present.” Told almost completely in dark, eerie black-and-white photographs — the camera moves only once, pulling back on the opening establishing shot of the titular pier at Paris’s Orly airport, and at another point a woman opens her eyes in bed — La Jetée explores time and memory as a WWIII survivor (Davos Hanich) in the underground Palais de Chaillot galleries revisits an event that occurred with a woman (Hélène Chatelain) on the jetty. The film, referred to in the credits as “un photo-roman,” is narrated by Jean Négroni, with the only dialogue occasional unintelligible whispering by the German scientists in charge of the mysterious operation; the soundtrack also includes lush music from Trevor Duncan and a repeated thumping that mimics heartbeats. The film explores both art as memory and memory as art as well as the cinema itself; for example, Marker (Sans Soleil, Le joli mai) references Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo when the man and woman look at the rings of a Sequoia tree, and it has gone on to influence such films as Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, the Matrix trilogy, and countless other movies and videos. It’s a mesmerizing work that brings fresh insight upon each viewing.

In 1943, the husband-and-wife team of Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid made the fourteen-minute masterpiece, Meshes of the Afternoon, at their home in Hollywood. The silent work — soundtracks were added by others later — is a celebration of the surreal, filled with shots of shadowy figures and such objects as a flower, a key, a knife in a loaf of bread, and a telephone receiver off its cradle. Stairs and slow motion figure prominently as a black-draped figure with a mirror for a face haunts the proceedings and the protagonist is joined by her doppelgänger. The film stands with such works as Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou and Ballet Mécanique, René Clair’s Entr’acte, and Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet as masterpieces of the avant-garde.

Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop) seeks so much more out of life in Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl

Ousmane Sembène’s debut, 1966’s Black Girl, launched an award-winning career that established the Senegalese author and filmmaker as a leading international storyteller for five decades. In Black Girl, also known as Le noire de . . . , Mbissine Thérèse Diop stars as Diouana, a Senegalese woman who leaves Dakar to work for a wealthy French family in Antibes. Colonialism rules the day as she tries to assert her identity but is treated with dismissive condescension. Early on, a dinner-party guest announces, “I’ve never kissed a black woman,” and pecks her on each cheek as she stares away blankly and the others laugh. “I’ve got a feeling she’s angry,” another guest says, while one of the men adds, “Their independence has made them less natural.” Diouana dreams of a better life as she remembers what it was like in Senegal, but she is thwarted by racism and bigotry every step of the way. Sembène, who would go on to make such films as Mandabi, Faat Kiné, and Moolaadé, incorporates a unique editing style with an often playful silent-film-like score to share Diouana’s longing for something else.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

BREATHING UNDERWATER: DROWNING DRY AT IFC

A summer outing offers multiple traumatic situations in Lithuanian drama Drowning Dry

DROWNING DRY (SESĖS; SISTERS) (Laurynas Bareiša, 2024)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
July 18-31
www.ifccenter.com
www.dekanalog.com

In 2018, Lithuanian filmmaker Laurynas Bareiša served as one of the cinematographers on Marija Kavtaradzė’s debut feature, Summer Survivors, about young adults dealing with mental illness. Bareiša now follows up his own debut feature, the 2021 crime drama Pilgrims, with the haunting Drowning Dry, which could have also been called Summer Survivors. (The Lithuanian title, Sesės, means “Sisters.”)

Close siblings Ernesta (Gelminė Glemžaitė) and Justė (Agnė Kaktaitė) have traveled with their families for a weekend getaway at a cabin on a lake. Ernesta is married to Lukas (Paulius Markevičius), an MMA champion, and they have a young son, Kristupa (Herkus Sarapas); Justė is married to Tomas (Giedrius Kiela), a schlubby dude jealous of Lukas’s strength, and they have a young daughter, Urte (Olivija Eva Viliüné). They all go swimming off the pier, but when tragedy strikes, their relationships with one another change — until Bareiša, who wrote, directed, and photographed the film, reverses time and the result of the event is altered, rearranging the dynamics. Bareiša ends up doing this multiple times, as various episodes happen differently from how they occurred originally, so the interaction among the characters keeps shifting as they face alternate forms of grief and trauma.

Drowning Dry is named after the medical term “dry drowning,” an urban myth that instills fear in parents that their children can drown long after they have been rescued from water. “Dry drowning is a symbol of this overprotection of kids because the real medical condition is very rare,” Bareiša told the Hollywood Reporter. Bareiša was inspired to make the film after having to resuscitate his two-year-old son and thinking about four paths the near-tragedy could have taken, represented by the adults in the film. By the end, numerous characters are having breathing difficulties, requiring help.

The film unfurls in long, uncut scenes in which Bareiša barely moves the camera; it is as if we are there with the family, sitting at the table, standing by the pier, waiting for the ambulance — or perhaps seeing it as a memory of our own grief. The repetition, or doubling, of certain scenes puts the audience in the position of questioning what they’re experiencing and wondering about the disparate paths their personal trauma could have led to.

Drowning Dry opens July 18 at IFC Center, with Bareiša on hand for Q&As at the 7:20 shows on Friday, moderated by Ryan Lattanzio, and Saturday, moderated by Sierra Pettengil.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]