Documentary about Edward Burtynsky and his large-scale photographs is filled with unsettling beauty
MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES (Jennifer Baichwal, 2005)
Maysles Institute
343 Malcolm X Blvd. between 127th & 128th Sts.
Friday, May 11, suggested donation $10, 7:30
Series runs May 11-13
212-582-6050
www.mayslesinstitute.org
www.zeitgeistfilms.com
Photographer Edward Burtynsky has been traveling the world with his large-format viewfinder camera, taking remarkable photographs of environmental landscapes undergoing industrial change. For Manufactured Landscapes, cinematographer Peter Mettler and director Jennifer Baichwal joined Burtynsky on his journey as he documented ships being broken down in Chittagong, Bangladesh; the controversial development of the Three Gorges Dam Project in China, which displaced more than a million people; the uniformity at a factory in Cankun that makes irons and the Deda Chicken Processing Plant in Dehui City; as well as various mines and quarries. Burtynsky’s photos, which were on view at the Brooklyn Museum in late 2005 and often can be seen in Chelsea galleries, are filled with gorgeous colors and a horrible sadness at the lack of humanity they portray. As in the exhibit, the audience is not hit over the head with facts and figures and environmental rhetoric; instead, the pictures pretty much speak for themselves, although Burtynsky does give some limited narration. Baichwal lets the camera linger on its subject, as in the remarkable opening shot, a long, slow pan across a seemingly endless factory. She is also able to get inside the photographs, making them appear to be three-dimensional as she slowly pulls away. Manufactured Landscapes is screening May 11 at the Maysles Cinema as part of the Beyond the Image series, which examines how photography is used in documentary film, and will be followed by a Skype Q&A with Baichwal, moderated by photographer Katie Murray. Curated by Clara Bastid, Maira Nolasco, and Zack Taylor, the series continues May 12 with Cheryl Dunn’s Everybody Street and Albert Maysles and Bradley Kaplan’s Close Up: Photographers at Work, followed by a reception and panel discussion with Maysles, Dunn, and photographers Ricky Powell and Clayton Patterson, moderated by Taylor, and May 13 with Christian Frei’s War Photographer, followed by a Q&A with Nolasco and journalist Jimmie Briggs.
British director Grant Gee, who has previously made such music documentaries as Meeting People Is Easy (about Radiohead), Demon Days: Live at the Manchester Opera House (with Gorillaz), and Joy Division, takes off on a more literary journey with Patience (After Sebald). Commissioned to examine a written work of fiction or nonfiction, Gee chose to delve into W. G. Maximilian Sebald’s highly influential 1995 book, The Rings of Saturn, about a character named W. G. Sebald who goes on a walk through Suffolk in East Anglia, veering off in his mind in all directions, waxing poetic on history, geography, life, death, literature, and other subjects. “In August 1992,” Sebald begins in the existential travelogue, “when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.” In the film, Gee includes shots of his own feet as he follows Sebald’s path, along with archival footage that relates to the book itself as such writers, artists, and cultural critics as Rick Moody, Tacita Dean, Ian Sinclair, Marina Warner, Adam Phillips, Andrew Motion, and Robert McFarlane talk about Sebald, who died in 2001 at the age of fifty-seven, and the importance of the hard-to-define Rings. To match the older footage, Gee shot much of the new material in a hazy, grainy black and white, with the talking heads occasionally appearing on camera almost in the background. The film includes fascinating snippets of a rare radio interview with Sebald in addition to a narrator reading sections from the book, both of which end up being far more interesting than what many of the other contributors have to say. Reminiscent of Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Ruins, Robinson in Space, and London, Gee’s Patience fetishizes its subject but lacks the visual and aural poetry of those works, with the walk becoming somewhat tiresome until its offbeat surprise ending. As on most trips, there are beautiful moments, engaging digressions, and gorgeous landscapes to linger over, but they grow fewer and farther between as the story unfolds. Although it’s not necessary to have read the book in order to follow Gee’s wanderings, it would probably help. Patience (After Sebald) opens May 9 at Film Forum, with the 8:20 show on opening night introduced by Sebald friend Moody, and the 8:20 show on May 11 will be introduced by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, editor of The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald.
Gus Van Sant’s Milk is a solid if surprisingly standard biopic focusing on the last eight years in the life of Harvey Milk, the gay activist and politician who was assassinated in 1978. Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy, To Die For, Good Will Hunting) follows the eventual unofficial Mayor of Castro Street (Sean Penn) as he moves to San Francisco with his much younger partner, Scottie Smith (James Franco), and sets up a camera shop that soon becomes an important meeting ground for the local gay community, fighting for equal rights and supporting Milk as he continually campaigns for public office. The battle hits its high point in 1978 when Milk takes on John Briggs (Denis O’Hare) and the Briggs Initiative, also known as Proposition 6, which sought to take away existing employment rights from gays and lesbians in the California public school system, eerily reminiscent of the recent battle over Proposition 8 there. Although Milk was a rallying figure — his opening mantra was always “My name is Harvey Milk, and I am here to recruit you!” — the film never quite takes off the way it wants to, instead becoming too reverential and melodramatic. Penn, who won an Oscar for his portrayal, is good but subdued in the lead role; the best performance comes from Josh Brolin as Dan White, Milk’s main adversary among the SF supervisors. Milk is screening May 9 and 19 at MoMA as part of the series “Focus Features: 10th Anniversary Salute,” which pays tribute to the New York-based distributor responsible for such cutting-edge independent films as Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, and David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, all of which are part of this festival, which runs through May 20.
This brilliant work comes from the warped mind of Charlie Kaufman, the sensational scribe behind Being John Malkovich, Adaptation., and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. (Chris Elliott fans will get a kick out of knowing that Kaufman was a writer for Get a Life, one of the great warped series of all time.) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind stars Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet as a couple looking to erase each other from their memories by . . . ah, don’t worry what it’s about. The less you know, the better. Just be prepared for a visual, metaphysical spectacle that will both exhilarate and depress you, filling you with wonder and amazement. The only thing keeping it from perfection is the ordinariness of the subplot involving Elijah Wood. Kaufman and director Michel Gondry (The Science of Sleep) mix in a little Punch-Drunk Love and Groundhog Day, both of which also featured former television comedians in more serious roles, but end up with something wholly original and, quite simply, one of the most romantic movies we have ever seen.Eternal Sunshine is screening May 9 and 19 at MoMA as part of the series “Focus Features: 10th Anniversary Salute,” which pays tribute to the New York-based distributor responsible for such cutting-edge independent films as Gus Van Sant’s Milk, Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, and David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, all of which are part of this festival, which runs through May 20.