this week in film and television

MY REINCARNATION

Documentary looks at the complex relationship between a father and son

MY REINCARNATION (Jennifer Fox, 2010)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, October 28
212-924-3363
www.myreincarnationfilm.com
www.cinemavillage.com

More than twenty years in the making, Jennifer Fox’s My Reincarnation tells the fascinating story of a very unusual father-son relationship amid the modern world of tulkus, or reincarnated Tibetan lamas. World-renowned high Tibetan Buddhist Master Chögyal Namkhai Norbu travels around the world teaching meditation and Dzogchen practice. He meets with the Dalai Lama, advises students and fans, signs copies of his many books, and builds support for his beleaguered native land, Tibet. But his son, Yeshi Silvano Namkhai, who was born in 1970 in Italy (where Rinpoche Namkhai Norbu taught at university from 1964 to 1992), had no desire to follow in his father’s footsteps and instead went into the computer business, starting a family and rejecting nearly everything his father believes in — including that Yeshi might just be the reincarnation of his great-uncle, Khyentse Rinpoche Chökyi Wangchug, and so is destined for a life of service and tradition. “Everybody knows about me and nobody knows me at all,” Yeshi says about trying to establish his own identity. Father and son and the rest of the family allowed Fox remarkable access, holding nothing back as they talk about their lives and each other; Yeshi is particularly vocal about his father’s treatment of him over the years. But soon Yeshi has a change of heart, and the documentary takes an unexpected turn. Fox, who has previously made such films as Beirut: The Last Home Movie, Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman, and An American Love Story, shot more than one thousand hours of footage, which she edited down to a tight seventy-five-minutes, including archival and newsreel footage as well. As much as it is about a father and a son, My Reincarnation is also about the old vs. the new, tradition vs. modernization, private love vs. public responsibility, the spiritual vs. the technological, and, above all, familial legacy. My Reincarnation opens at Cinema Village on October 28; Fox and Yeshi will participate in several Q&As and/or introductions on October 28 and 29, with Fox also taking part in Q&As following the 7:00 screenings on November 2 and 3.

WEEKEND CLASSICS — AKI KAURISMÄKI: THE MATCH FACTORY GIRL

Aki Kaurismäki concludes the Proletariat Trilogy with THE MATCH FACTORY GIRL

THE MATCH FACTORY GIRL (TULITIKKUTEHTAAN TYTTÖ) (Aki Kaurismäki, 1990)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
October 28-30, $13, 11:00 am
Series continues through December 18
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki completes his conceptual Proletariat Trilogy with the bleakest, most deadpan of the three examinations of working-class life with the wickedly funny, blacker-than-black comedy The Match Factory Girl. The follow-up to 1986’s Shadows in Paradise and 1988’s Ariel, the finale tells the sad story of a poor young woman who just can’t seem to catch a break. Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen stars as Iris, an assembly-line drone who makes way too much out of a rare one-night stand with the devastatingly disinterested Aarne (Vesa Vierikko), leading to all kinds of problems for her, both professionally and personally. Continuing the subtly dramatic color scheme of the previous two films, cinematographer Timo Salminen, set designer Risto Karhula, and Kaurismäki add sly bursts of blue and orange as things keep getting worse and worse for Iris, who, despite her name, doesn’t really see the world for what it is, instead living in a bizarre kind of fantasy until she decides to do something about it. The Match Factory Girl cemented Kaurismäki’s reputation as one of the most fascinating young international filmmakers, which he’s lived up to with such later favorites as Juha, Cannes Grand Prix winner The Man Without a Past, and his latest, Le Havre, which is currently playing at Lincoln Plaza and the IFC Center. The Match Factory Girl is screening October 28-30 as part of the IFC Center’s Weekend Classics series, which will keep showing Kaurismäki films through December 18.

HALLOWEEN WEEKEND: THE SHINING

All work and no play makes Jack Nicholson far from a dull boy in THE SHINING

THE SHINING (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, October 29, free with museum admission, 7:00
Series runs October 28-30
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

The classic horror story The Shining has been back in the news of late, first with a wrongly rumored special screening that was said to include the two-minute finale that Stanley Kubrick cut out immediately after the film opened in 1980 — one that we thought we had imagined seeing for many years until we discovered the truth, which also involved the iconoclastic director riding his bicycle to various theaters, armed with a pair of scissors — and then with Stephen King’s “announcement” that he was writing a sequel to the original 1977 book, this time focusing on a grown-up Danny Torrance. Anyway, Kubrick’s film is one of the all-time-great frightfests, a truly scary movie about a writer named Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson at his overacting best) who has agreed to become the caretaker of the old Overlook Hotel in Colorado during the snowy winter when the enormous mountain resort closes down for the season. He is joined by his perpetually nervous wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and their young son, Danny (Danny Lloyd), who seems to have brought along his invisible friend, Tony, who speaks through Danny’s finger. Between taking care of the Overlook and working on his novel, Jack finds a whole bunch of other folks to hang out with, people who have populated the place during the ritzy establishment’s golden age, including a strange woman in room 237. Kubrick plays with horror conventions as he seeks to scare the crap out of the audience, something he accomplishes time and time again as Jack grows more disturbed, Wendy’s shrieks become more and more ear piercing and annoying, and Danny’s visions get more and more bloody. No matter how many times you’ve seen it, it still gets you, even when you know exactly what’s lurking around that corner. The Shining is screening on Saturday night at 7:00 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s Halloween Weekend programming and the “See It Big!” series, which also includes Ridley Scott’s Alien on Friday night at 7:00 and Sunday afternoon at 4:00. (You might not want to see that one on a full stomach.) On Saturday at 1:00 & 4:00 and Sunday at 1:00, Frank Oz’s Little Shop of Horrors will be shown, in conjunction with the “Henson Screenings and Programs” series, and on Sunday afternoon at 2:30, “Movie Monsters and More: A Master Class with Special Effects Makeup Artist Mike Marino” will be held. The weekend concludes Sunday night at 7:30 with an eightieth anniversary screening of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) with Sara Karloff, Boris’s daughter, who will discuss her father’s life and career and show home movies.

TONEELGROEP AMSTERDAM: CRIES AND WHISPERS

A brave artist’s impending death is the focus of multimedia stage adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s CRIES AND WHISPERS at BAM (photo by Jan Versweyveld)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. between Ashland & Rockwell Pl.
October 25-29, $25-$80, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.tga.nl

The Brooklyn Academy of Music has had a long and fruitful relationship with Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, presenting his films as well as stage productions over the decades. Among the plays Bergman directed at BAM were A Doll’s House, Long Day’s Journey into Night, Miss Julie, The Ghost Sonata, Maria Stuart, and Ghosts, and shortly after his death BAM put together a stellar lineup of actors to read from his diary, including Bibi Andersson, Pernilla August, Lena Olin, and Peter Stormare. BAM and the late auteur continue their collaboration this week with the U.S. premiere of Toneelgroep Amsterdam multimedia adaptation of Bergman’s 1972 intense family drama Cries and Whispers, which starred Harriet Andersson, Kari Sylwan, Ingrid Thulin, and Liv Ullmann. The Dutch company, led by director Ivo van Hove, has previously adapted such cinematic gems as John Cassavetes’s Faces, Husbands, and Opening Night and Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers and Ludwig in addition to classic works by Shakespeare, Molière, Williams, Hellman, O’Neill, Ibsen, Chekhov, Pinter, and others. Cries and Whispers features scenography by Jan Versweyveld, dramaturgy by Peter van Kraaij, video design by Tal Yarden, costumes by Wojciech Dziedzic, and sound design by Roeland Fernhout, all coming together for what looks to be an appropriately complex and moving experience.

A family faces some harsh truths in CRIES AND WHISPERS (photo by Jan Versweyveld)

Update: Ivo van Hove paints a harrowing, brutal, yet ultimately strangely comforting portrayal of death in Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s intense and, at times, inexplicable Cries and Whispers, running at BAM’s Harvey Theater through October 29. Liberally adapted from Ingmar Bergman’s 1972 film — the company previously staged Bergman’s epic, documentary-like Scenes from a Marriage — this multimedia version turns the protagonist, Agnes (an immensely brave Chris Nietvelt), into a visual artist who is recording her final days, evoking Hannah Wilke’s “Intra-Venus” project. Jan Versweyveld’s stunning set contains mirrors, video screens, television monitors, a drop-down white surrounding wall, reflective glass, and multiple rooms in a mansion where Agnes is being cared for by her sisters, Karin (Janni Goslinga) and Maria (Helina Reijn), and her attending nurse, Anna (Karina Smulders). The pain Agnes feels is physically and emotionally palpable, echoing throughout the theater, especially when she releases an ear-piercing, shattering death howl as an overhead camera swings like a pendulum counting down her last breaths. The twelve silent minutes that follow are mesmerizing — and the show is still barely half over at that point. Although van Hove offers snippets of the other characters’ lives, not enough is learned about them, and there is a heavy dose of nudity, both male and female, that seems titillating but not always necessary. And some viewers might need a stronger stomach when Agnes takes care of some unpleasant bodily functions in plain view. Van Hove has added personal touches to the story, influenced by the death of his own father, who died in 2007, the same year as Bergman. The white color scheme is offset by Agnes’s blue paint and videos, providing a stark contrast that pays homage to Sven Nykvist, who won the Oscar for Best Cinematography for his camerawork on the film version. Van Hove recently told Gothamist that he’ll be back at BAM with an even bigger production for the 2012 Next Wave Festival; we can’t wait to see what he has up his sleeves for that.

STRANGER THAN FICTION: JAY ROSENBLATT SHORTS

Jay Rosenblatt’s new THE D TRAIN is part of specially curated program at IFC Center

IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Tuesday, October 25, $16, 8:00
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.jayrosenblattfilms.com

Last October, former therapist Jay Rosenblatt presented the New York premiere of yet another masterpiece, The Darkness of Day (2009), at MoMA, along with other “long shorts,” “diary films,” and “short shorts” composed primarily of found and archival footage and home movies. For more than thirty years, the San Francisco-based Rosenblatt, who was born in New York, has been making films that examine the human psyche in unique, unusual ways. On October 25, he will host a specially curated selection of his work as part of the IFC Center’s “Stranger than Fiction” series, including The Darkness of Day, Afraid So (2006), Human Remains (1998), King of the Jews (2000), and his latest, The D Train (2011). The Darkness of Day is a twenty-six-minute examination of suicide inspired by the self-inflicted deaths of two people Rosenblatt knew. Using footage rescued from school Dumpsters, he incorporates industrial and educational films about suicide, touching on such well-known cases as the Hemingway family and the first man to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge as well as that of a Japanese woman who leaped into a volcano, setting off a rash of copycats. Beverly Berning and Richard J. Silberg narrate the film, which includes readings from a suicide victim’s journal, in a steady monotone that is a trademark of Rosenblatt’s work. The Darkness of Day is both fascinating and frightening, perhaps the most honest look at suicide we’ve ever seen. In the three-minute Afraid So, Garrison Keillor reads from a poem by Jeanne Marie Beaumont that asks questions that all can be answered by the title while Rosenblatt shows related images; among the questions are “Is this going to hurt?,” “Will it leave a scar?,” “Are you contagious?,” and “Will I have to put him to sleep?” Human Remains, “a film about the banality of evil,” looks at Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Francisco Franco, and Mao Tse Tung; King of the Jews, “a film about fear and transcendence,” deals with Rosenblatt’s own childhood fear of Jesus; and The D Train chronicles an old man’s life in five minutes. Despite their often very serious subject matter, Rosenblatt’s films are absolutely thrilling to watch, intellectually stimulating, visually vibrant, and emotionally powerful.

BERNARD HERRMANN

Movie music maestro Bernard Herrmann scored dozens of classic cinema scenes, including Cary Grant on the run in Alfred Hitchcock’s NORTH BY NORTHWEST (courtesy Photofest)

Film Forum
209 West Houston St. between Varick St. & Sixth Ave.
Through November 3
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
www.thebernardherrmannestate.com

Taking the art of the film score to a whole new level, composer extraordinaire Bernard Herrmann had an innate sense of how to make movies better through music. He wrote scores for more than fifty films in his too-brief thirty-five-year career (he died in 1975 at the age of sixty-four), including nine by the figure he is most often identified with, suspense master Alfred Hitchcock, whom he also had a well-known falling out with. Herrmann worked with a diverse range of directors, scoring classic outings by Orson Welles, Henry Hathaway, François Truffaut, Michael Curtiz, Martin Scorsese, William Dieterle, Robert Wise, Raoul Walsh, Brian De Palma, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Henry King, Nicholas Ray, Nunnally Johnson, and others. Oddly, the New York City-born maestro, whose career began with Citizen Kane and concluded with Taxi Driver, was nominated for only five Oscars, winning for his second film, 1941’s The Devil and Daniel Webster. He also composed concert pieces and scores for radio, television, and the stage in addition to his more famous film work, which is on display in a two-week series at Film Forum that continues through November 3. It’s an impressive body of work, including Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (October 23-24), Dieterle’s The Devil and Daniel Webster (October 24), Mankiewicz’s The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (October 25 in a double feature with Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry), Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (October 26-27 with John Brahm’s Hangover Square), and Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still (October 30 with Hitchcock’s The Birds). On October 28, Film Forum will be screening the inspired double feature of Taxi Driver and J. Lee Thompson’s original Cape Fear (in which Robert Mitchum shows Robert De Niro how it’s done), while the psychological suspense will be turned up a notch on Halloween with the pairing of Psycho with De Palma’s Obsession. The oddest double feature is November 1’s stop-motion duo of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts, attesting to Herrmann’s range. “Herrmann would have been delighted, though perhaps not surprised, at the growing amount of attention attracted by his music in recent years,” his widow, Norma, writes on the estate’s official website. “There has been interest from a whole new generation who were not even born during his lifetime.” The series at Film Forum offers that generation a great opportunity to experience Herrmann’s work for the first time, as well as allowing those who’ve grown up with his genius another chance to see it (and hear it) on the big screen.

AÏDA RUILOVA: GONER

A woman is terrorized by an unseen presence in Aïda Ruilova’s psychological horror short

Salon 94 Bowery
243 Bowery between Stanton & Rivington Sts.
Goner through Saturday
Prop House through Sunday
212-979-0001
www.salon94.com
www.aidaruilova.com/goner.htm

Today is the last day to see West Virginia-born Aïda Ruilova’s claustrophobic horror short Goner, which follows a young woman in a white night shirt (Sonja Kinski) as she is terrified by an unseen predator. Quick cuts, a handheld camera, and blood splatters propel this tense psychological thriller, which is projected onto the far wall in the downstairs space at Salon 94 Bowery. We’re not sure why the gallery chose to end this exhibition, which also includes miniature stills from Goner and several of Ruilova’s other films, just a week before Halloween, but it’s still a good way to get your scare on as you prepare for the annual pagan celebration. However, Ruilova’s Prop House, which comments on the props used in horror films, can be seen tomorrow, projected onto the gallery’s outside wall.