this week in film and television

CARRIE MAE WEEMS: THE SHAPE OF THINGS

Carrie Mae Weems’s “The Shape of Things” continues at the armory through December 31 (photo by Stephanie Berger Photography/Park Avenue Armory)

THE SHAPE OF THINGS
Park Ave. Armory
643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 31, $18
www.armoryonpark.org
carriemaeweems.net

“How do we measure a life?” Carrie Mae Weems asks in her multichannel installation Cyclorama — Conditions, a Video in 7 Parts, the centerpiece of her Park Ave. Armory presentation “The Shape of Things.” Over footage of several women and one man, she asks, “Do we measure it by the forgotten / or by the remembered / by all the near misses and the exhaustion / or by the ability to endure / how / do we measure it by race / by class / by gender / by beauty / and by your lover’s love or your hater’s hate / or by pushing against the wind / against the tide / against family / against tradition / how / or do we measure it by the suffering of our friends and our enemies alike / or by the beginning / or by the end / by the way we confront life / or by the way we confront death?”

“The Shape of Things” is a masterful multidisciplinary examination of where we are today as a nation as we face systemic racism, health and income inequality, police brutality, and the perpetuation of the Big Lie. Through the seven sections of Cyclorama, organized in a large circle of screens, Weems mixes archival footage with new material shot in Syracuse, the Flea Theater, and the Watermill Center of such performers as Nona Hendryx, okwui okpokwasili, Vinson Fraley, Francesca Harper, Carl Hancock Rux, Basil Twist, and dozens of others, depicting modern times as a dangerous circus where Black and brown bodies are in constant threat. The final text is adapted from a commencement address Weems, a MacArthur Fellow, gave to the graduating class of SVA in May 2016 at Radio City Music Hall.

In front of Cyclorama is Seat or Stand and Speak, where attendees can sit in a chair or stand on a box and shout into megaphones. All Blue — A Contemplative Site is a dark space with a few steps leading to a door that opens to the moon and stars, a place of reflection, meditation, and hope. Across the way is Lincoln, Lonnie and Me, a 2012-14 work about presence and absence that is like a “Pepper’s Ghost” carnival sideshow with minstrel elements. Visitors enter an enclosed area bathed in red and stand behind a velvet rope, watching holographic-like projections of ghostly characters as we hear Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground”; Weems reads a revised version of the Gettysburg Address; visual artist and activist Lonnie Graham speaks on social change; excerpts from Weems’s 2008 video Constructing History: A Requiem to Mark the Moment play, including a reenactment of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; and Weems dresses up as a Playboy bunny to Urge Overkill’s cover of Neil Diamond’s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon.”

The long side gallery features a row of several dioramas paying tribute to victims of racism, from It’s Over — A Diorama, consisting of a swan, candles, balloons, a globe, a fallen column, and photographs, to framed portraits from Weems’s “Missing Links” series from The Louisiana Project, in which she dresses up as various animals in suits, with such titles as “Happiness” and “Despair,” to The Weight, a diorama with three pink helium globes rising out of sculptures of African women’s heads, balancing the tenuous world. Also be on the lookout for a painting of Minerva, shown as a Black goddess, hanging in the hall among the portraits of white military heroes.

From December 9 to 11, dozens of performers activated the space, with live music and dance, film screenings, and panel discussions. But you don’t need others to help you activate the space for yourself as Weems places us firmly in the past, present, and future of an America that is getting more and more difficult to measure every day.

FRANCE

Léa Seydoux is radiant as a famous journalist facing a crisis in Bruno Dumont parable France

FRANCE (Bruno Dumont, 2021)
Film at Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater, Francesca Beale Theater
144/165 West Sixty-Fifth St. at Amsterdam Ave.
www.filmlinc.org

“Doing harm once doesn’t mean you’ll keep doing it. That said, if you don’t think someone can change. . . . You believe in nothing. Everyone can change,” an interview subject (Annick Lavieville) tells star television journalist France de Meurs (Léa Seydoux) in Bruno Dumont’s overstuffed social satire, France. The film’s title refers not only to the reporter but to the country itself, as de Meurs’s experiences are supposed to mimic those of the republic’s, although it’s not always clear how.

The film opens with France playing gotcha with President Emmanuel Macron at a press conference; reveling in her attack question, she makes funny faces with her producer, Lou (Blanche Gardin), as if Macron’s answers don’t matter. And indeed they don’t; on her flashy news show, A View of the World, the fearlessly ambitious France creates her own reality, whether it’s manipulating a meeting in the mountains with a Tuareg chief (Youannes Mohammed) battling ISIS jihadists, disregarding fans wanting autographs, hosting political debates on her program, or giving short shrift to her husband, Fred (Benjamin Biolay), and their young son, Jojo (Gaëtan Amiel). She is dismissive, cynical, selfish, and self-serving, as it’s all about the optics and furthering her furious need to succeed.

We might not like her — in fact, we might despise her, which is part of the point, as she represents the state of contemporary media — but every once in a while she lets some actual humanity seep in. When she accidentally injures a man named Baptiste (Jawad Zemmar), she seems genuinely concerned, as he is the sole support for his immigrant parents (Noura Benbahloouli and Abdellah Chadouat). But the North African family is so in awe that such a famous person is visiting them and trying to help, even though she caused the accident and injury, that they refuse to accept any money from her. It presages a later accident that will change her life in a very different way.

Written and directed by Dumont (Camille Claudel 1915, La Vie de Jésus), France keeps the viewer at a distance, perhaps just like the country does. Cinematographer David Chambille’s camera adores Seydoux (The French Dispatch, No Time to Die, Blue Is the Warmest Color), whether she’s dressed in glamorous outfits or wearing military gear in the middle of a firefight. Her shoulder-length blond hair and ruby-red lipstick light up the screen even when she is staring off into the distance, deep in thought that she is likely never to reveal, or perhaps even fully understand herself. France is like an old-fashioned movie star as the film comments on cinema itself in a digital age of reality television and the twenty-four-hour cycle of biased and fake news.

Lou (Blanche Gardin) and France de Meurs (Léa Seydoux) prepare to manipulate their next story in France

Dumont also takes on the social order. “The golden age of nations is over. Nations have lost their authority for good,” a speaker tells guests at a fundraiser. Talking about capitalism, redemption, and salvation, a man at France’s table says, “Believe me, we must give, we must give and keep giving. You won’t run out of money, we’re so rich. To die well, one must die poor. Once you’re dead, your kindness will remain.” But all of the kindness may have already been drained out of de Meurs, without her even realizing it.

The relationship between de Meurs and Lou evokes that of Midge (Rachel Brosnahan) and Susie (Alex Bornstein) on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, but here the pair of women are so unpleasant that you don’t want to see them together too much. And by the time we’re supposed to at last feel some sympathy and concern for France, it’s too late.

“France is sad,” a man says at one point. He could be referring to the country, the character, or the film itself.

REVOLUTION OF OUR TIMES: A FILM BY HONGKONGERS

Kiwi Chow’s Revolution of Our Times goes behind the scenes of Hong Kong protest

REVOLUTION OF OUR TIMES (Kiwi Chow, 2021)
Stuart Cinema
79 West St., Brooklyn
Opens Friday, December 10
www.stuartcinema.com

Kiwi Chow’s Revolution of Our Times is a fearless, unrelenting, unapologetic documentary that takes viewers into the maelstrom of Hongkongers’ impassioned fight for justice against the strong arm of Mainland China.

The January 25 Revolution in Egypt was harrowingly captured on film in Stefano Savona’s 2011 Tahrir: Liberation Square and Jehane Noujaim’s 2013 The Square. The 2014 Revolution of Dignity in Kyiv was memorably re-created in Mark and Marichka Marczyk’s immersive production Counting Sheep. In 2020, people around the world marched to protest the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. And on January 6, 2021, Americans were glued to their screens as violent insurrectionists stormed the US Capitol. Chow takes the documenting of public protest to a new level in his film, opening December 10 at Stuart Cinema in Brooklyn.

In 1997, the transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong passed from the British to China, but twenty years later, Hongkongers still hadn’t received the self-rule they had been promised. In 2019, they began marching against the Fugitive Offenders and Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation (Amendment) Bill, which called for extradition to Mainland China, giving legal authority to Beijing over Hong Kong citizens. A grassroots campaign soon turned into two million protesters taking to the streets, marching for freedom.

Chow puts viewers right in the middle of the ferocious action, following seven teams as they organize resistance against the heavily armed police amid brutal beatings, rubber and real bullets, tear gas, armored vehicles, and water cannons blasting liquid allegedly infused with a toxic blue substance. Told in such chapters as “The Beginning of the End,” “The United Front,” “Powerlessness,” “One Body,” and “The End of the Beginning,” the 150-minute film features remarkable on-the-ground footage combined with news reports and interviews with some of those on the front lines, including fourteen-year-old student Conscience, sixteen-year-old V Boy, twenty-year-old social work student Snake, twenty-three-year-old Sentinel Station coordinators Logic and Marx, twenty-seven-year-old salesperson Runner, voluntary first aider Morning, twenty-five-year-old administrative executive Mom, thirty-two-year-old business manager Dad, and others, their faces obscured to hide their identities. Chow was unable to locate some subjects for new interviews, as they had disappeared. “Everyone is a nobody. Nobody is everyone,” twenty-two-year-old parent-cars coordinator Nobody says.

Providing perspective are social worker Jackie Chen, Causeway Bay Bookstore founder Lam Wing-kee, legal scholar and Occupy Central leader Benny Tai, and heroic reporter Gwyneth Ho, who bravely broadcast what was happening live.

Evoking the 2014 Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong, many of the protesters carry umbrellas as both shield and statement; they wear hardhats, gas masks, goggles, and, in some cases, bulletproof vests. As protesters start dying — Chow shows a few being dropped from buildings and one getting shot point blank in the chest — the resistance arms itself with Molotov cocktails while pushing the concept “Be Water” to slip away from the police and change strategy on the fly.

The fight for freedom continues as Hongkongers battle Mainland China

Calling out, “Liberate Hong Kong! Revolution of Our Times!” the protesters are organized into such groups as the Valiants, the Shield Men, the Smoke Controllers, the Map Team, and the Driving Team, incorporating gaming techniques while communicating via the Telegram messaging app. They challenge LegCo chief executive Carrie Lam and university presidents, who they see as loyal to Beijing. “I don’t want this to become the next 6/4 Tiananmen Square!” a woman yells at police in riot gear. Seventy-three-year-old farmer Uncle Chan becomes a savior, risking his life as a guardian of the children.

Chow (Ten Years: Self Immolator, A Complicated Story, Beyond the Dream) keeps coming back to one young man who in many ways is the prime example of how peaceful protest can quickly turn into something else at the hands of the police and a totalitarian regime. “I never thought I would get shot,” he says over footage of protesters being dragged through the burning streets and being fired at. “I got shot above my eye the first time. I was lucky; I was most scared of not being able to walk out of there. Can’t go back to the front line. Actually, I did these things because I wanted to tell the government that Hongkongers will not be silenced because of money or oppression. I will not let anyone rob me of my freedom. I will not let anyone take away my freedom of thought. I will not let anyone take away my free will.”

Watching Revolution of Our Times is a brutal experience that underlines the fear the world has of Xi Jinping’s China, as no nation helps the protesters. They are left in an impossible situation, especially as they are barricaded inside Poly U for a final, chilling confrontation. The score is unnecessarily sentimental and the ending is overly zealous, but the words and images tell an unforgettable story that, in 2021, is not improving, not in Hong Kong and not anywhere else. But as current affairs commentator Lee Yee says about the revolution, “There is no turning back.” And as several activists assert, despite all the setbacks, the movement is far from over.

PIONEERS GO EAST COLLECTIVE: CROSSROADS

The next edition of gorno’s Yonsei f*ck f*ck is part of Pioneers Go East Collective “Crossroads” series at Judson Memorial Church

Who: Pioneers Go East Collective
What: Performance series
Where: Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South between Thompson & Sullivan Sts.
When: Thursday, December 9 & 16, free – $50 (sliding scale), 8:00
Why: Pioneers Go East Collective was founded in 2010 as “an arts and cultural organization inspiring a lively exchange of queer art and culture by connecting people to ideas and experiences.” Focusing on social engagement, collaboration, accessibility, and relevance, the Manhattan-based group has put on such multimedia performances as My name’sound, Virgo Star, and American Mill No. 2 at such venues as La MaMa, Ars Nova, A.R.T/ New York Theatre, and Triskelion Arts. On December 9 and 16, PGEC returns to Judson Memorial Church for the performance and video series “Crossroads,” building a community of art, poetry, music, dance, film, and more around the work of multigenerational queer, BIPOC, and feminist artists.

On December 9 at 8:00, curator Hilary Brown-Istrefi brings together ALEXA GRÆ’s eve’s witness. 2 soliloquies to the night, created by GRÆ, Jon Wes, and Matthew Ozawa with text by Connie Edgemon; Arien Wilkerson’s climate change performance installation Equators, made in collaboration with David Borawski, Jon-Paul LaRocco, and Domenic Pellegrini; and gorno’s (Glenn Potter-Takata) Yonsei f*ck f*ck pt. 12, a collaboration with evan ray suzuki and Kimiko Tanabe. The program on December 16 consists of dancer Lydia Mokdessi and musician Jason Bartell’s Devotion Devotion IV, joined by vocalist Syd Island; Marija Krtolica’s Infinite Subjectivity, a dance-theater piece performed by Michael Mangieri and Krtolica, with live music and reading by Jason Ciaccio and text by Søren Kierkegaard; and Janessa Clark’s film Future Becomes Past, with dancer Courtney Drasner revisiting a 2003 solo, photographed by Kathleen Kelley with music by Ben Lukas Boysen and Sebastian Plano, along with an untitled work in progress by Clark.

FEDERICO FELLINI: COMPLETE RETROSPECTIVE

Federico Fellini directs two actors in Block-notes di un regista (Felllini: A Director’s Notebook)

FEDERICO FELLINI
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
The Debra and Leon Black Family Film Center
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through January 12
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

Italian auteur Federico Fellini gave the world a view of society and the human condition like no other filmmaker. A former caricaturist, joke writer, and journalist, Fellini made twenty-four films before passing away in 1993 at the age of seventy-three. MoMA is celebrating his wide-ranging and incredibly influential legacy by screening every one of his works as a director (earning four Oscars in the process), from 1950’s Luci del varietà (Variety Lights) to 1990’s La voce della luna (The Voice of the Moon), in 4K restorations. In between are such classic, unique works as La Strada (The Road), Amarcord, La Dolce Vita, Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria), Roma (Fellini’s Roma), Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits), Otto e mezzo (8½), and La città delle donne (City of Women), among many others that helped redefine cinematic storytelling by breaking all the rules. Below are only a few favorites being shown in this complete retrospective.

Giulietta Masina is unforgettable in Fellini masterpiece Nights of Cabiria

NIGHTS OF CABIRIA (LE NOTTI DI CABIRIA) (Federico Fellini, 1957)
MoMA Film
Monday, December 6, 7:00
www.moma.org

Giulietta Masina was named Best Actress at Cannes for her unforgettable portrayal of a far-too-trusting street prostitute in Nights of Cabiria. Directed by her husband, Federico Fellini, produced by Dino De Laurentiis, and written in collaboration with Pier Paolo Pasolini, the film, Fellini’s second to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film (after La Strada), opens with Cabiria taking a romantic stroll by the river with her boyfriend, Giorgio (Franco Fabrizi), who suddenly snatches her purse and pushes her into the water, running off as she nearly drowns. Such is life for Cabiria, whose sweet, naive nature can turn foul tempered in an instant.

Over the course of the next few days, she gets picked up by movie star Alberto Lazzari (Amedeo Nazzari), goes on a religious pilgrimage with fellow prostitutes Wanda (Franca Marzi) and Rosy (Loretta Capitoli), gets hypnotized by a magician (Ennio Girolami), and falls in love with a tender stranger named Oscar (François Périer). But nothing ever goes quite as expected for Cabiria, who continues to search for the bright side even in the direst of circumstances. Masina is a delight in the film, whether yelling at a neighbor, dancing the mambo with Alberto, or looking to confess her sins, her facial expressions a work of art in themselves, ranging from sly smiles and innocent glances to nasty smirks and angry stares.

Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) is in a bit of a personal and professional crisis in Fellini masterpiece 8½

8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)
MoMA Film
Friday, December 10, 7:00
www.moma.org

“Your eminence, I am not happy,” Guido (Marcello Mastroianni) tells the cardinal (Tito Masini) halfway through Federico Fellini’s self-reflexive masterpiece 8½. “Why should you be happy?” the cardinal responds. “That is not your task in life. Who said we were put on this earth to be happy?” Well, film makes people happy, and it’s because of works such as 8½. Fellini’s Oscar-winning eighth-and-a-half movie is a sensational self-examination of film and fame, a hysterically funny, surreal story of a famous Italian auteur who finds his life and career in need of a major overhaul. Mastroianni is magnificent as Guido Anselmi, a man in a personal and professional crisis who has gone to a healing spa for some much-needed relaxation, but he doesn’t get any as he is continually harassed by producers, screenwriters, would-be actresses, and various other oddball hangers-on. He also has to deal both with his mistress, Carla (Sandra Milo), who is quite a handful, as well as his wife, Luisa (Anouk Aimée), who is losing patience with his lies.

Trapped in a strange world of his own creation, Guido has dreams where he flies over claustrophobic traffic and makes out with his dead mother, and his next film involves a spaceship; it doesn’t take a psychiatrist to figure out the many inner demons that are haunting him. Marvelously shot by Gianni Di Venanzo in black-and-white, scored with a vast sense of humor by Nino Rota, and featuring some of the most amazing hats ever seen on film — costume designer Piero Gherardi won an Oscar for all the great dresses and chapeaux — 8½ is an endlessly fascinating and wildly entertaining exploration of the creative process and the bizarre world of filmmaking itself. And after seeing 8½, you’ll appreciate Woody Allen’s 1980 homage, Stardust Memories, a whole lot more.

Terence Stamp is an alcoholic, fast-fading Shakespearean star in Federico Fellini’s Toby Dammit

SPIRITS OF THE DEAD: TOBY DAMMIT (Federico Fellini, 1968)
MoMA Film
Wednesday, December 8, 7:00, & Tuesday, December 21, 4:00
www.moma.org

MoMA is presenting all three of Federico Fellini’s shorter works: Agenzia matrimoniale (A Marriage Agency) was part of the 1953 omnibus L’amore in città (Love in the City), which also includes films by Carlo Lizzani, Michelangelo Antonioni, Dino Risi, Francesco Maselli and Cesare Zavattini, and Alberto Lattuada, while the 1969 documentary Block-notes di un regista (Felllini: A Director’s Notebook) was made for NBC television, about an uncompleted project. Toby Dammit concludes the Edgar Allan Poe anthology Spirits of the Dead, following Roger Vadim’s Metzengerstein, starring Jane Fonda and Peter Fonda, and Louis Malle’s William Wilson, with Alain Delon and his doppelgänger.

Adapted by Fellini and Bernardino Zapponi from Poe’s “Never Bet the Devil Your Head: A Tale with a Moral,” Toby Dammit is fiercely unpredictable, evoking La Dolce Vita and 8½ as British actor Toby Dammit (Terence Stamp) is lured to Rome to make a movie in exchange for a Ferrari. Amid bizarre interview segments, an absurdist awards ceremony, and meetings with his overbearing producers, Toby is haunted by a girl with a white ball (Marina Yaru). Toby Dammit is screening with 1962’s Le tentazioni del dottor Antonio (The Temptations of Doctor Antonio), featuring Anita Ekberg in a film dealing with sexual repression.

BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING WITH Q&A

(Keir Dullea) comforts his sister (Carol Lynley) in BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING

Stephen (Keir Dullea) tries to comfort his sister, Ann (Carol Lynley), in Bunny Lake Is Missing

BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING (Otto Preminger, 1965)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Sunday, December 7, $15, 7:00
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

“I had heard all the rumors about Preminger, but I felt he wouldn’t do that to me. I was wrong, oh so wrong,” Keir Dullea told Foster Hirsch in the 2007 biography Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King, referring to the making of the 1965 psychological noir thriller Bunny Lake Is Missing and Preminger’s notorious treatment of actors. “I was playing a crazy character and the director was driving me crazy. . . . About halfway through the shoot, I began to wonder, Who do you have to f&ck to get off this picture?” On December 7, Dullea (2001: A Space Odyssey, David and Lisa) will talk with Hirsch over Zoom following a special screening at Film Forum of the fiftieth anniversary 4K digital restoration of the 1965 work. In the intensely creepy film, loosely based on the novel by Merriam Modell (under the pseudonym Evelyn Piper), Carol Lynley stars as Ann Lake, a young woman who has just moved to London from New York. She drops off her daughter, Bunny, for her first day of school, but when she returns later to pick her up, there is no evidence that the girl was ever there. When Superintendent Newhouse (Laurence Olivier) and his right-hand man, Sergeant Andrews (Clive Revill), begin investigating the case, they are soon wondering whether Bunny really exists, more than hinting that she might be a figment of Ann’s imagination.

Television veteran Lynley, who seemed on the verge of stardom after appearing in such films as Return to Peyton Place, Bunny Lake Is Missing, Shock Treatment, and The Poseidon Adventure but never quite reached that next level, gives one of her best performances as Ann, a tortured woman who is determined to stop her world from unraveling around her. Dullea is a model of efficiency as the cold, direct Stephen, a character invented by Preminger and screenwriters John and Penelope Mortimer. Shot in black-and-white by Denys N. Coop on location in London, the film also features cameos by longtime English actors Martita Hunt, Anna Massey, and Finlay Currie as well as the rock group the Zombies and Noël Coward, who plays Ann’s very kooky landlord, Horatio Wilson. Saul Bass’s titles, in which a hand tears paper as if the story is being ripped from the headlines, set the tense mood right from the start. The ending offers some neat twists but is far too abrupt. “No actor ever peaked with him. How could you?” Dullea added to Hirsch about Preminger (Laura, Stalag 17). “The subtlety that I felt I was able to give to my work in 2001, because Stanley Kubrick created a safe atmosphere where actors were not afraid to be foolish or wrong, was missing on Otto’s set. I don’t hate him; it’s too long ago. But the experience was the most unpleasant I ever had.” It should be quite fascinating to hear more from Dullea and Hirsch on December 7; Hirsch will be on hand to sign copies of his book as well.

FLASH FORWARD: DEBUT WORKS AND RECENT FILMS BY NOTABLE JAPANESE DIRECTORS

Masayuki Suo takes the audience on a wild ride in Talking the Pictures

FLASH FORWARD
Japan Society online and in-person
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
December 3-23, free – $10 online for three-day rental, $15 in person December 11 & 17, 7:00
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

Japan Society and the ACA Cinema Project (Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan) follow up their inaugural festival, “21st Century Japan: Films from 2001-2020,” with “Flash Forward: Debut Works and Recent Films by Notable Japanese Directors,” running December 3-23 online and in person.

The three-week series highlights the work of six established Japanese directors, pairing their debut with a more recent film. Available on demand as a three-day rental for ten dollars or fifteen dollars per bundle are Naomi Kawase’s 1997 Cannes Camera d’Or-winning Suzaku and 2018 Vision, Miwa Nishikawa’s 2003 Wild Berries and 2016 The Long Excuse, Shuichi Okita’s 2009 The Chef of South Polar and 2020 Ora, Ora Be Goin’ Alone, Junji Sakamoto’s 1989 Knockout and 2016 The Projects (see review below), and Masayuki Suo’s 1989 Fancy Dance and 2019 Talking the Pictures. Akihiko Shiota’s 1999 Moonlight Whispers was supposed to be teamed up with his 2019 Farewell Song but will not be shown because of music rights issues; it has been replaced by his fourth film, the 2002 drama Harmful Insect.

The “Filmmakers on the Rise” section comprises recent works by six directors who might be part of “Flash Forward” if it were held again in 2040: Masakazu Kaneko 2016 The Albino’s Trees, Yuko Hakota’s 2019 Blue Hour, Omoi Sasaki’s 2017 A Boy Sato, Eisuke Naito’s Forgiven Children, Kyoko Miyake’s 2013 My Atomic Aunt, and Hiroshi Okuyama’s 2019 Jesus. These films are available for free on demand. Also free are two online talks, “Conversations with the Filmmakers,” with Kawase, Nishikawa, Okita, Sakamoto, Shiota, and Suo, and the panel discussion “Debut Works and Beyond,” with Columbia assistant professor Takuya Tsunoda, UCLA assistant professor Junko Yamazaki, and writer, curator, and filmmaker Jasper Sharp, moderated by Yale professor Aaron Gerow.

Two in-person screenings at Japan Society celebrate the late master Sadao Yamanaka, who made more than two dozen films in the 1930s, few of which survive, before dying in Manchuria in 1938 at the age of twenty-eight. On December 11 at 7:00, a new 4K restoration of Yamanaka’s 1935 Tange Sazen and the Pot Worth a Million Ryo will have its North American premiere, followed December 17 at 7:00 by the international premiere of the 4K restoration of Yamanaka’s 1936 Priest of Darkness.

Hinako (Naomi Fujiyama) and Seiji Yamashita’s (Ittoku Kishibe) lives change once again with the return of Shinjo (Takumi Saitoh) in The Projects

THE PROJECTS (DANCHI) (団地) (Junji Sakamoto, 2016)
film.japansociety.org

“Nothing is impossible in a housing project,” several people say in Junji Sakamoto’s delightfully absurdist and downright weird black comedy The Projects, which made its North American debut at Japan Society’s tenth annual Japan Cuts Festival in 2016. Elderly couple Hinako (Naomi Fujiyama) and Seiji Yamashita (Ittoku Kishibe) have moved to an inexpensive suburban Osaka housing project, known as a danchi, after closing their popular herbal remedies shop following the tragic death of their son, Naoya. The couple lives quietly, unable to process their grief or move forward, but they’re back in business when one of their strangest customers, the well-dressed, oddly speaking Shinjo (Takumi Saitoh), tracks them down and essentially demands, in his calm, direct manner, that they begin making his special remedy again. Meanwhile, Seiji, who would rather be left alone, is dragged into the race for head of the tenant association, running against Gyotoku (Renji Ishibashi), who is having an affair with a younger resident and is married to Kimiko (Michiyo Okusu), who is obsessed with properly separating the danchi’s garbage, and young upstart Yoshizumi (Takayuki Takuma), who is not afraid to discipline his son, Kitaro (Hiroaki Ogasawara), in full view of his neighbors. After Seiji loses, he decides to hide from everyone, retreating under the floorboards whenever someone stops by, which leads a gossiping group of ladies (Hikaru Horiguchi, Yukari Taki, Mayu Harada, Mari Hamada, and Miyako Takeuchi) to believe that Hinako has actually killed her husband and chopped up the body. As the media and police get involved, things get crazier and crazier as the totally bizarre conclusion approaches.

Fujiyama and Kishibe are absolutely charming as the Yamashitas, moving and talking with a sweetly warm, slow demeanor, asking little from a life that has let them down. Sakamoto wrote The Projects specifically for comedian and stage actress Fujiyama; the two last worked together on the award-winning 2000 film Face, Fujiyama’s first film, and the pairing is another marvel. Fujiyama is wonderful in the role, imbuing Hinako with a wry, very funny sense of humor that is splendidly complemented by Kishibe’s more serious Seiji. Lovingly shot by Ryo Ohtsuka and featuring a playful score by Gorô Yasukawa, The Projects is pure fun all the way through, with many laugh-out-loud moments even as it deals with some heavy subjects, right up to its out-of-this-world finale. Don’t let the title fool you; “projects” in Japan were much-desired apartment complexes originally built in the 1950s to supply suburban public housing for the growing post-WWII Japanese population. Although they are not as popular today, they are not the kind of projects associated with drugs and crime in America. The Projects is paired with Sakamoto’s 1989 debut, Knockout (Dotsuitarunen), in “Flash Forward: Debut Works and Recent Films by Notable Japanese Directors.”