Winfred Rembert tells his fascinating life story in ALL ME
ALL ME: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF WINFRED REMBERT (Vivian Ducat, 2011)
Maysles Institute
343 Malcolm X Blvd. between 127th & 128th Sts.
Wednesday, January 11, 6:30 reception, 7:30 screening
212-582-6050
www.allmethemovie.com
www.mayslesinstitute.org
Curator Sylvia Savadjian and the Maysles Institute have put together a terrific program for Wednesday night, offering audiences the opportunity to meet one of the most fascinating characters they’re ever likely to come upon. Born in 1945 in rural Georgia to a mother who abandoned him when he was three months old, Winfred Rembert grew up picking cotton, dropped out of high school, spent time in jail and on a chain gang, and lost nearly all his teeth. But it was his years behind bars that turned him into a new man, as he learned to read and write and developed a unique art style that soon had him carving out the tales of his life on leather. Longtime journalist, producer, and writer Vivian Ducat tells Rembert’s amazing story in her engaging feature-length debut, All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert. Ducat follows the oversized Rembert, who regularly bubbles over with joy, as he returns for a show in Cuthbert, Georgia, and prepares for a big opening in New York City. “I know he’s here for a reason,” his sister Lorraine says in the film. “To help people and to be a witness through his art.” Throughout All Me, Rembert discusses many of his works, in which he uses indelible dyes on carved leather, in great detail, each one representing a part of his life, focusing on being a poor black man in a white-dominated society. It is quite poignant late in the film when he points out that his art seems to be most appreciated by whites even though it is meant as a visual history for blacks. But what really makes the documentary work is not just that Rembert is such an enigmatic, larger-than-life figure but that his art is exceptional, his self-taught, folksy style reminiscent of such forebears as Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, capturing a deeply personal, intensely intimate part of the black experience in twentieth-century America. Rembert will be at the Maysles Institute on January 11 for a reception, a screening of All Me, and what should be an enlightening Q&A with Ducat. And if you’re as captivated by Rembert’s story as we are, you can see more of his work in his “Amazing Grace” exhibition, running January 21 through May 5 at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers.
Martin Scorsese wears his cinematic heart on his sleeve in his first family-friendly film, Hugo. Based on Brian Selznick’s Caldecott-winning 2007 illustrated historical-fiction novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the 3-D movie follows the adventures of the title character, a homeless orphan boy (Asa Butterfield) who survives by his wits in a Paris train station in the early 1900s. He spends his days stealing small bits of food, winding the big clock, avoiding Inspector Gustav (Sacha Baron Cohen), and trying to find parts for an automaton he is rebuilding, hoping it will have a message for him from his father (Jude Law). He soon makes his only friend, a girl named Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) who is being raised by her godparents, the bitter Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley) and his wife, Mama Jeanne (Helen McCrory). When it turns out that Papa Georges is the one and only Georges Méliès, who made the world’s first science-fiction film, A Trip to the Moon, among hundreds of others, then was thought to have died in obscurity, all of his work destroyed, Hugo and Isabelle, along with the help of film historian René Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg), are determined to resurrect Papa Georges and his reputation. Gorgeously shot by Robert Richardson and featuring marvelous period sets by Dante Ferretti, Hugo is beautiful to look at, the camera roaming through the immense train station and up the tall clock tower like in a Jules Verne story. Such side plots as the budding romances between a café owner (Frances de la Tour) and the newspaper seller (Richard Griffiths) and between Gustav and a shy flower girl (Emily Mortimer) feel forced, and the main narrative meanders its way into treacly territory as all the parts slowly come together. At its heart, Hugo is a movie about the love of movies, paying tribute to the early cinema of Méliès, Harold Lloyd, and others but it gets too stuck on the underlying theme of the preservation of old films, one of Scorsese’s driving forces. Still, Hugo is a visual treat in which Scorsese makes the most of 3-D technology, particularly in the first half, before things get a little too sticky (and slickly) sweet, even for a children’s film. 
