this week in film and television

GERHARD RICHTER PAINTING

Gerhard Richter reveals his creative process in fascinating new documentary (photo courtesy of Kino Lorber)

GERHARD RICHTER PAINTING (Corinna Belz, 2011)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
March 14-27
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
www.gerhard-richter-painting.de

There’s nothing abstract about the title of Corinna Belz’s documentary on German artist Gerhard Richter, no missing words or punctuation marks. Gerhard Richter Painting is primarily just that: Ninety-seven minutes of Gerhard Richter painting as he prepares for several exhibitions, including a 2009 show at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York City. In 2007, Belz got a rare chance to capture Richter on camera, making a short film focusing on the stained-glass window he designed for the Cologne Cathedral. Two years later, the shy, reserved German artist, who prefers to have his art speak for itself, invited Belz into his studio, giving her remarkable access inside his creative process, which revealingly relies so much on chance and accident. Belz films Richter as he works on two large-scale canvases on which he first slathers yellow paint, adds other colors, then takes a large squeegee and drags it across the surface, changing everything. It’s fascinating to watch Richter study the pieces, never quite knowing when they are done, unsure of whether they are any good. It’s also painful to see him take what looks like an extraordinary painting and then run the squeegee over it yet again, destroying what he had in order to see if he can make it still better. “They do what they want,” he says of the paintings. “I planned something totally different.” About halfway through the film, a deeply concerned Richter starts regretting his decision to allow the camera into his studio. “It won’t work,” he says. “At the moment it seems hopeless. I don’t think I can do this, painting under observation. That’s the worst thing there is.” But continue he does, for Belz’s and our benefit. Belz (Life After Microsoft) even gets Richter to talk a little about his family while looking at some old photos, offering intriguing tidbits about his early life and his escape to Düsseldorf just before the Berlin Wall went up. Belz also includes clips from 1966 and 1976 interviews with Richter, and she attends a meeting he has with Goodman about his upcoming show, lending yet more insight into the rather eclectic artist. “To talk about painting is not only difficult but perhaps pointless, too,” Richter, who turned eighty last month, says in the 1966 clip. However, watching Gerhard Richter Painting is far from pointless; Belz has made a compelling documentary about one of the great, most elusive artists of our time. “Man, this is fun,” Richter says at one point, and indeed it is; watching the masterful artist at work is, well, a whole lot more fun than watching paint dry. Gerhard Richter Painting opens on March 14 at Film Forum, with Yale School of Art dean Robert Storr introducing the 8:00 screening.

MONDAY NIGHTS WITH OSCAR: CAVALCADE

CAVALCADE gets a rare public screening Monday night as part of Noël Coward in New York festival

CAVALCADE (Frank Lloyd, 1933)
Academy Theater at Lighthouse
111 East 59th St.
Monday, March 12, $5, 7:00
www.oscars.org
www.noelcowardinnewyork.com

Hailed in ads as the “Picture of the Generation,” Frank Lloyd’s 1933 historical family epic, Cavalcade, took home the Academy Award for Best Picture, along with trophies for Best Art Direction (William S. Darling) and Best Director. The tale of the British Marryott clan from 1899 to 1933, the film was based on the 1931 play by Noël Coward and adapted by Russian screenwriter Sonya Levien (State Fair, Oklahoma!) and Hollywood scribe Reginald Berkeley (Dreyfus). Featuring songs by Coward, George M. Cohan, and others, the film earned a Best Actress nod for Diana Wynyard as family matriarch Jane Marryot and also stars Clive Brook, Una O’Connor, and Bonita Granville. The only Best Picture winner not available as a single DVD — it’s part of a three-volume Fox seventy-fifth anniversary package — Cavalcade will get a rare public screening tonight at the Monday Nights with Oscar series at the Academy Theater, hosted by Brad Rosenstein, curator of the exhibition “Star Quality: The World of Noël Coward,” on view at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center through August 18. The screening and the display are part of the Noël Coward in New York festival, which continues with a series of special events including lectures, live performances, staged readings, and a master class at Juilliard.

IT’S A FINE ROMANCE: CYRANO AGENCY

Things get a little too personal for Byung-hun (Uhm Tae-woong) in Korean rom-com CYRANO AGENCY

KOREAN MOVIE NIGHT: CYRANO AGENCY (SHIRANO) (Kim Hyeon-seok, 2010)
Tribeca Cinemas
54 Varick St. at Laight St.
Tuesday, March 13, free, 7:00
Series runs every other Tuesday through February 28
212-759-9550
www.tribecacinemas.com
www.koreanculture.org

Desperate to raise cash so they can renovate an old theater and put on productions again, a small theater company resorts to matchmaking, writing real-life scripts and acting out parts in order to light a spark between their client and the object of his or her desire. Using the latest technological gadgetry, including a microphone in a pair of glasses, the secret company, known as the Cyrano Agency — named after the 1897 play by Edmond Rostand in which the ugly Cyrano de Bergerac writes love letters to help Christian capture the heart of the beautiful Roxane, the woman they both love — creates elaborately choreographed scenarios that slowly bring the man and woman together, led by director Byung-hun (Uhm Tae-woong) along with his associates, Min-young (Park Shin-hye), Jae Pil (Jun A-min), and Chul-bin (Park Cheol-min). The Cyrano Agency boasts a success rate of one hundred percent, but that record is suddenly in jeopardy when Byung-hun discovers that their latest client, fund manager Sang-yong (Daniel Choi), has fallen hard for Hee-joong (Rhee Min-jung), the director’s former girlfriend. A huge hit in its native Korea, Cyrano Agency is a silly but fun romantic comedy that riffs on Korean soap operas and the familiar Cyrano tale. The multilayered narrative works well through most of the movie, especially as Min-young starts to suspect something is up with Byung-hun, who seems to be sabotaging their current project. Writer-director Kim Hyeon-seok (When Romance Meets Destiny, YMCA Baseball Team) pours on the melodrama for the sappy finale, but Cyrano Agency is still a light and fanciful story of love and heartache. Cyrano Agency is screening for free Tuesday at Tribeca Cinemas, kicking off the next Korean Movie Night series, “It’s a Fine Romance,” which continues March 27 with the New York premiere of My Girlfriend Is an Agent and April 10 with the U.S. premiere of Petty Romance.

MOVING IMAGE CONTEMPORARY VIDEO ART FAIR

Daniel Phillips’s three-channel installation RIVER STREET is one of the highlights of Moving Image fair (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Waterfront New York Tunnel
269 11th Ave. between 27th & 28th Sts.
Through March 11, free
212-643-3152
www.moving-image.info

The second annual Moving Image Contemporary Video Art Fair is back in the long, narrow Waterfront New York Tunnel in Chelsea, featuring more than thirty videos and installations from around the world. Upon entering the space from the Eleventh Ave. side, you will find yourself immersed in Janet Biggs’s Predator and Prey, where you can take a seat in the middle of two large screens that follow a polar bear, a horse, and an eagle. For the three-channel River Street, Daniel Phillips documented his rehabilitation of the dilapidated area around his studio and projects the videos on three blocks made from objects and materials he gathered from the construction site. The always playful and innovative Kate Gilmore is represented by Built to Burst, which captures the artist from above as she smashes pots of paint on a series of platforms to create something wholly new. Alex Prager’s Despair, which was recently shown at MoMA, employs colorful, fantasy-like imagery to tell the story of a possible suicide. Martha Wilson uses makeup and camera angles “to deform myself in the way that I fear the most” in the large-screen I have become my own worst fear / Deformation. In Marina Zurkow’s charming black-and-white animation Mesocosm (Northumberland UK), a naked man sits on a tree stump as the seasons pass by around him. There are also creative videos by Sama Alshaibi, Josh Azzarella, Eelco Brand, Susanne Hofer, Jesse McLean, Jenny Perlin, and Yael Kanarek, among others. And be sure not to miss Jesse Fleming’s agonizing The Snail and the Razor, in which a snail ominously attempts to climb over a sharp razor blade. Since you could easily spend much of the day at Moving Image, you can narrow down which videos you want to see by checking out excerpts of every one included in the fair in advance here. On Saturday at noon, Bridgette Howard will moderate the panel discussion “Moving Image Technology of Tomorrow” with Jacob Gaboury, Steven Sacks, and Anne Spalter, followed at 2:00 with Rebecca Cleman moderating the spotlight panel “What Do You Get When You Buy Video Art?” with Lisa Dorin, Jefferson Godard, and Fabienne Stephan.

GEOFF DYER ON TARKOVSKY, CINEMA, AND LIFE: THE MIRROR

Geoff Dyer will discuss his obsession with Andrei Tarkovsky in a special program at the Museum of the Moving Image that includes a screening of the Russian master’s MIRROR

SEE IT BIG! THE MIRROR (ZERKALO) (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Sunday, March 11, free with museum admission, 3:00 & 6:00
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
www.geoffdyer.com

“Words can’t really express a person’s emotions. They’re too inert.” So says Andrei Tarkovsky’s dream-filled, surreal masterpiece The Mirror, which features long scenes with little or no dialogue. Tarkovsky turns the mirror on himself and his childhood to tell the fragmented and disjointed story of WWII-era Russia through his own personal experiences with his family. Tarkovsky was obsessed with film as art, and this nonlinear film is his poetic masterpiece; he even includes his father’s poems read over shots that are crafted as if paintings. Many of the actors play several roles; have fun trying to figure out who is who and what exactly is going on at any one moment. The Mirror is screening on March 11 at 6:00 at the Museum of the Moving Image as part of the special program “Geoff Dyer on Tarkovsky, Cinema, and Life” and the ongoing “See It Big!” series and will be introduced by award-winning author Dyer, whose latest nonfiction tome is Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room (Pantheon, February 21, $24), an obsessively detailed examination of Tarkovsky’s Stalker in which he makes it very clear that the Russian filmmaker’s work must be seen on the big screen. At 3:00, Dyer will participate in a conversation with the museum’s chief curator, David Schwartz. For more on Dyer and his other local appearances, check out our twi-ny talk with him, which you can find here.

NINA MENKES: THE BLOODY CHILD

Nina Menkes’s THE BLOODY CHILD uses a fractured narrative and ambiguous characters to tell the story of a brutal murder

THE BLOODY CHILD (Nina Menkes, 1996)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
March 9, 9:00; March 11, 7:00; March 15, 7:00
212-505-5181
www.anthologyfilmarchives.org
www.ninamenkes.com

Inspired by an actual event that took place during the first Gulf War, Nina Menkes’s The Bloody Child is a visually captivating abstract tale of murder. Shot in the 29 Palms area of the Mojave Desert, the film is essentially told backward in three distinct sections. In one, a group of Marine officers have discovered a dead woman in the back of a car. It’s a crystal-clear beautiful day as they come and go, discussing the situation in dialogue that is often hard to make out. In another, people are having a good time in a dark bar, the men shooting pool, the women being entertained by a male stripper. And in the third, an ash-covered angelic figure lies naked in a forest, carving a prayer in Hebrew on her arm as the witches’ chant from Macbeth is repeated on the soundtrack. Despite its abstract, fractured narrative and ambiguous, unidentified characters, The Bloody Child is an atmospheric, gripping tale. Menkes tells the story in long takes with little or no camera movement, almost as if action is secondary to mood. Casting actual Marines in the film — in addition to her sister, Tinka, who stars in most of her work and plays the Marine captain here — Menkes imbues the film with a reality that lends it a documentary feel, enhanced by gorgeous poetic moments that lift things to a higher plane. The Bloody Child is screening March 9, 11, and 15 as part of Anthology Film Archives’ weeklong Menkes retrospective that also includes such films as Dissolution (2010), The Great Sadness of Zohara (1983), Magdalena Viraga (1986), The Bloody Child (1996), and Phantom Love (2007).

NINA MENKES: DISSOLUTION (HITPARKUT)

Didi Fire plays a desperate man in Menkes’s haunting DISSOLUTION

DISSOLUTION (Nina Menkes, 2010)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
March 9-15
212-505-5181
www.anthologyfilmarchives.org
www.ninamenkes.com

“For me, cinema is sorcery, a creative way to interact with the world in order to rearrange perception and expand consciousness — both the viewer’s and my own,” says master filmmaker Nina Menkes. A citizen of Israel, Germany, and the United States, Menkes has made only six feature-length films and three shorts over the course of thirty years but has established an international reputation that deserves to be more widespread in America. On the occasion of the U.S. theatrical release of her latest film, Dissolution, Anthology Film Archives is holding a retrospective of Menkes’s career, following a festival held last month at her alma mater, UCLA. Shot in an Arab section of Tel Aviv and loosely based on Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Dissolution is an intense psychological drama seething with an inner violence that is ready to explode at any moment. Didi Fire, who cowrote and coedited the film with Menkes, stars as a deeply troubled Israeli man desperate for money. The film opens with Fire gently nudging a snail with his foot, the imminent threat of his stomping on it readily apparent. Soon he is furiously sharpening a knife, obsessively timed to a ticking metronome. “There are no rules in this world. Misfortune is not punishment, nor is good luck a reward,” he later tells a friend “All meaning is barren. . . . This world has no core, except that core which has shattered.” After committing a brutal murder, he, like Raskalnikov, is left to deal with the guilt that is ravaging his soul. Shot in sharp black-and-white with a handheld digital video camera and featuring Menkes’s first male protagonist, Dissolution is a haunting tale that is as much about one man’s journey as it is about the violence and unrest that permeates throughout Israel. Named Best Drama at the 2010 Jerusalem International Film Festival, it is a powerful morality play that never preaches at the audience, instead telling its story slowly and determinedly as it unfolds in a world of scorpions and spiders, ghosts and inner demons. Dissolution is running at Anthology daily March 9-15, along with screenings of such other Menkes works as The Great Sadness of Zohara (1983), Magdalena Viraga (1986), The Bloody Child (1996), and Phantom Love (2007). As a bonus, Menkes will be on hand to talk about her career at select screenings.