this week in film and television

MY HARRY

Photographer unknown, Harry Smith at Naropa Institute, gelatin silver print, 1990 (Harry Smith Papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; gift of the Harry Smith Archives)

MY HARRY
Whitney Museum of American Art, Education Center and Hess Family Theater
99 Gansevoort St.
December 8-10, $18-$25
212-570-3600
whitney.org

The Whitney celebrates the legacy of American polymath Harry Smith in the three-day festival “My Harry.” Held in conjunction with the multimedia exhibition “Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith,” which continues at the museum through January 28, the revelry features listening sessions, illustrated lectures, film screenings, conversations, live music, art workshops, and more, with appearances by friends and colleagues of Smith, who was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1923 and died in New York City in 1991 at the age of sixty-eight, leaving behind a treasure trove of music, art, and film that he both made and collected, as well as a lifelong interest in the occult. Among those participating in the weekend are Carol Bove, Ali Dineen, Bradley Eros, Raymond Foye, Andrew Lampert, April and Lance Ledbetter, James Inoli Murphy, Rani Singh, Peter Stampfel, Charles Stein, and Anne Waldman. Below is the full schedule.

My Harry: Magick and Mysticism
Friday, December 8, $8-$10, 5:30–9 pm

Listening Session: Harry Smith’s Field Recordings, 5:30

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: A Presentation by Carol Bove, with Carol Bove and Andrew Lampert, 6:30

Screening of Harry Smith’s “Film No. 14: Late Superimpositions,” 7:30

Harry Smith and the Future of Magick: A Presentation by Charles Stein, with Charles Stein and Raymond Foye, 8:00

Harry Smith, Untitled [Zodiacal hexagram sctratchboard], ink on cardstock, ca 1952 (Lionel Ziprin Archive, New York)

My Harry: Stories, Songs, and Strings
Saturday, December 9, free with museum admission, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm

Stop Motion Animation Studio and Paper Airplane Workshop, hosted by Bradley Eros, 11:00 am – 3:00 pm

Singing Circle with Ali Dineen, 11:00 am

Peter Stampfel and the Atomic Meta-Pagan Posse, with Peter Stampfel, Eli Smith, Zoe Stampfel, Eli Hetko, Steve Espinola, Paul Nowinski, Sam Werbalowsky, Heather Wagner, and Dok Gregory, 12:00

String Figure Workshop with James Inoli Murphy, 12:00

Paper Airplane Contest with Bradley Eros, 2:00

On Mahagonny: A Presentation by Rani Singh, 5:00

My Harry: Affinities
Sunday, December 10, free with museum admission, 11:00 am – 5:00 pm

Listening Session: Harry Smith’s Field Recordings, 11:00 am

On Harry’s Trail: A Presentation by Dust-to-Digital, with Lance and April Ledbetter, 12:00

Screening: A selection of films and videos featuring Harry Smith by a variety of the artist’s friends and associates, 1:00

Friendly Rivals: The Art of Jordan Belson, a Presentation by Raymond Foye, 3:00

Anne Waldman, 4:00

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

ARTIST FOR ACTION PRESENTS SHERYL CROW, PETER FRAMPTON, KEVIN BACON + SPECIAL GUESTS: A FATHER’S PROMISE FILM LAUNCH CONCERT

Who: Jimmy Vivino, Mark Barden, Sheryl Crow, Peter Frampton, Kevin Bacon, Bernie Williams, Rozzi, the Dumes, the Alternate Routes, Jen Chapin, Aztec Two-Step 2.0, more
What: Benefit concert for Sandy Hook Promise celebrating film launch
Where: NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 566 La Guardia Pl. between Third & Fourth Sts.
When: Thursday, December 7, $81-$256, 7:30
Why: “Music succeeds when politics and religion fail,” Darryl “DMC” McDaniels says in A Father’s Promise: The Story of a Father’s Promise to End Gun Violence, a documentary opening December 8 at LOOK Dine-In Cinema W57. Directed by Rick Korn and executive produced by Sheryl Crow, the film follows musician Mark Barden as he takes action after his seven-year-old son Daniel was one of twenty-six people murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012.

Barden, cofounder of Sandy Hook Promise, and filmmaker Korn teamed up with Matthew Reich and Neal Saini to form Artist for Action to Prevent Gun Violence. On December 7 at NYU Skirball, Barden and the Promise Band will join musical director Jimmy Vivino and a group of all-stars to celebrate the launch of the film; among the special guests performing live will be Crow, Peter Frampton, Kevin Bacon, Bernie Williams, Rozzi, the Dumes, the Alternate Routes, Jen Chapin, and Aztec Two-Step 2.0. The evening will be filmed for a future documentary, continuing to raise funds and awareness about the horrors of gun violence, the leading cause of death for children and teens in America.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

ISABELLE HUPPERT AT THE QUAD

Isabelle will be in person — not on the phone — at the Quad for Q&As following screenings of Jean-Paul Salomé’s La Syndicaliste

Who: Isabelle Huppert
What: Screenings followed by Q&As
Where: Quad Cinema, 34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
When: December 1-2 (festival continues all month)
Why: For more than half a century, French actress Isabelle Huppert has been one of cinema’s brightest stars. She’s appeared in more than 130 films, working with a who’s who of international directors, including Claude Chabrol, Márta Mészáros, Jean-Luc Godard, Diane Kurys, Bertrand Tavernier, David O. Russell, Joachim Trier, Hal Hartley, Ursula Meier, Bertrand Blier, Curtis Hanson, Hong Sang-soo, Ira Sachs, Paul Verhoeven, Wes Anderson, Michael Cimino, and Michael Haneke. She’s also done more than thirty plays, including 4.48 Psychose, The Maids, and The Mother in New York.

Huppert will be back in New York on December 1 and 2, participating in Q&As following screenings of Jean-Paul Salomé’s Venice Film Festival selection La Syndicaliste, a thriller in which Huppert plays real-life Irish trade unionist and whistleblower Maureen Kearney. Huppert will be at the Quad for the 7:15 show on December 1 and the 4:15 and 7:15 shows on December 2. The Quad will also be presenting “Restorations Starring Isabelle Huppert,” part of its ongoing “From the Vault: The Cohen Film Collection” series, on three Wednesdays in December: Benoît Jacquot’s 1999 Keep It Quiet on December 6, André Téchiné’s 1979 The Brontë Sisters on December 13, and Maurice Pialat’s 1980 Loulou on December 20. Finally, her latest film, François Ozon’s The Crime Is Mine, a murder mystery adapted from a 1934 play, opens exclusively at the Quad on December 25. Huppert, who turned seventy this past March, is as resplendent as ever, so these Q&As are must-see events.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

DOC NYC: NEIRUD

Filmmaker Fernanda Faya explores a lost part of her family’s past in Neirud

NEIRUD (Fernanda Faya, 2023)
Available online through November 26
Festival runs November 8-26 at IFC Center, SVA Theatre, Village East by Angelika, and Bar Veloce, $13-$30
www.docnyc.net
www.neirudfilm.com

“Who was Neirud?” Brazilian filmmaker Fernanda Faya asks in her poignant documentary, Neirud, making its international premiere at DOC NYC.

When Fernanda was an infant, her father, Edgard, bought a camcorder, taking lots of home movies of her. When she got older, Faya because curious about the woman she knew as her aunt, Élida Neirud dos Santos, who was best friends with Edgard’s mother, Grandma Nely. Faya’s mother was Jewish, and her father came from a nomadic Roma circus clan; Neirud was Black.

One afternoon, long after Nely’s death, Faya starts asking Neirud about her life. Neirud, was born in 1935 in São Francisco de Assis in Rio Grande do Sul, what Faya describes as Brazil’s whitest region, then raised in Livramento. Her parents sent her to live with a white family, where she was responsible for all the chores.

Neirud ran away when she was eight and became a nanny in Porto Alegre. When she was twelve, she joined the Great Circus Real Palassius. Fascinated by what she has learned in just a few minutes, Faya tells Neirud that she wants to conduct a more in-depth interview. Unfortunately, Neirud passed away a few months later, in 2014.

Neirud had left nothing behind; her apartment was empty: no clothes, no photos, no notebooks or journals. So Faya began a nearly ten-year-journey to find out everything she could about Nely, Neirud, and the circus, where the two women had met and where Neirud developed into an intimidating circus wrestler known as Mulher Gorila.

“I never really understood what they did, so in my mind, Aunt Neirud became a superhero, and Gorilla Woman, her circus persona, was her secret identity,” Faya says in voice-over narration. “Aunt Neirud became the only living memory of this circus history.”

The more Faya digs, the more she uncovers, unraveling the mystery of her aunt and grandmother. The story involves homosexuality, a military coup, racism, the church, and colorful balls on the beach.

Featuring a score by Brazilian guitarist and composer Chico Pinheiro, Neirud is a bittersweet documentary. Because of the whitewashing of history and selective memory, Faya (One for the Road) only knew so much about her family, and it’s a shame that she didn’t know more about her grandmother and aunt while they were still alive. At the same time, it is exciting to follow her as the truths slowly emerge and their beautiful, complicated, and important stories are told at last.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

DOC NYC: ANGEL APPLICANT

Ken August Meyer explores his connection to Swiss-German artist Paul Klee in Angel Applicant

ANGEL APPLICANT (Ken August Meyer, 2023)
Available online through November 26
Festival runs November 8-26 at IFC Center, SVA Theatre, Village East by Angelika, and Bar Veloce, $13-$30
www.docnyc.net
angel-applicant.com

During the pandemic, I watched a Zoom play called UnRavelled about Canadian scientist Anne Adams, who, in 1994, at the age of fifty-three, became obsessed with Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” and made a remarkable painting based on the musical work, which Ravel composed for dancer Ida Rubenstein in 1928, when he was fifty-three. As it turns out, both Adams and Ravel had the same serious brain disease, one that affects memory while lighting a creative fuse.

I was thinking about that play while watching Ken August Meyer’s Angel Applicant, in which Meyer becomes obsessed with Swiss-German painter Paul Klee, who suffered from systemic scleroderma, a diseases that attacks connective tissue and for which there is still no cure. Meyer was diagnosed with the same life-threatening disease, which ultimately spurred him to make this film, although he had little previous cinematic experience. Meyer is particularly taken by Klee’s later period, when the scleroderma affected Klee’s work significantly. Meyer believes that he can understand what Klee is saying in these canvases and how it relates to their shared, rare autoimmune disease.

In the film, Meyer, who wrote, directed, and edited it and produced it with director of photography Jason Roark, explains, “It’s really an odd sort of comfort for me. It’s not particularly cheerful, nor is it as colorfully inventive as his earlier work, but I’m obsessed with it. It really speaks to me like a strange language of cryptic codes and symbols that I can’t help but interpret for myself. And I know this is gonna sound completely crazy and pretty pretentious, but some of these paintings feel like they’re messages sent in a bottle just for me.”

Meyer, a former drugstore stock boy, Zamboni driver, graphic designer, and advertising art director, reviews his old family photos and home videos and intercuts them with images of Klee’s drawings and paintings, including Portrait White-Brown Mask, Atrophy, Insula Dulcamara, As Time Passes By, and High Spirits. He examines several of them in depth, decoding their meaning from a health standpoint while visually comparing them to shots of him undergoing testing and getting results in which the colors, shapes, and lines evoke elements of Klee’s work. “They are testaments that destruction can feed creation and make something so ugly so beautiful,” says Meyer, who studied art and design at the School of Visual Communication Design at Kent State University.

The film also features several reenactments of key moments from Meyer’s life. One takes place in a store where two women thought that Meyer, his body stiff from the disease, was actually a mannequin. “Did he also feel like a stiff, broken doll?” he asks, wondering whether Klee, known as the Bauhaus Buddha, had felt similarly. In addition, he flies to Bern to meet with one of Klee’s grandchildren, Alexander Klee, who cofounded the Zentrum Paul Klee and passed away in 2021 at the age of eighty.

Even as his condition worsens, Meyer refuses to give in, documenting his life as he gets married and has a child, who he wants to see grow up. He continues to get bad news about his health, but he keeps the camera going and doesn’t lose his sense of humor. “Fear was becoming the new order [in the world]. And somehow, it even found my home address,” he says, zooming in on a “Consider Cremation!” mailing he received.

Meyer named the film after a ghostly 1939 painting by Klee as well as his newfound belief that maybe angels do exist. When he asks, “How long do I have? And what comes after that?,” we fully believe that he’s not done yet. It’s also a question that we all ask ourselves, whether we’re ill or not.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

THE WILD PARROTS OF TELEGRAPH HILL 4K RESTORATION

Mark Bittner feeds several cherry-headed conures in The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill

THE WILD PARROTS OF TELEGRAPH HILL (Judy Irving, 2003)
New Plaza Cinema @Macaulay Honors College
35 West Sixty-Seventh St. between Central Park West & Columbus Ave.
Opens Friday, November 17
newplazacinema.org
pelicanmedia.org

Judy Irving begins her 2003 documentary, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, with a shot of a skeptical passerby who has stopped to watch Mark Bittner as he cares for a flock of forty-five cherry-headed conures, also known as red-masked parakeets, living in the trees outside his apartment.

“They’re not really wild if you have names for them, if you don’t mind my saying,” the man claims. “You feed them out of your hands, you have names for them, and they come up to you like they’re your pets. . . . Well, whatever.” He then shrugs and walks away.

The exchange doesn’t bother Bittner at all; he gleefully answers the suspicious man’s doubts and just continues doing what he’s doing, a big smile on his face.

It’s an extremely clever way to start the film, which opens November 17 in a brand-new 4K twentieth anniversary digital restoration at New Plaza Cinema. With the question of Bittner’s relationship with the birds resolved right up front, Irving, who served as director, producer, editor, and cinematographer, is free to now follow Bittner’s odd life choice.

Born in Vancouver, Washington, in 1951, Bittner moved from Seattle to Berkeley when he was twenty and then to San Francisco with the goal of making it as a rock-and-roll musician, in search of a “real transformation.” In 1993, he became infatuated with the conures, some of whom had previously been pets and others that had been born in the wild. Over the course of several years, he devoted his life to them, giving them names, caring for them when they were ill, watching out for predatory hawks, and keeping a somewhat scientific journal of their comings and goings and their individual personalities.

As if he’s sharing the plot of a soap opera, he talks about Scrapper and Scraperella’s breakup; discusses the pairing of Picasso and Sophie; introduces us to Fanny, Gibson, Flap, Pushkin, and Olive; sings to Mingus to get him dancing; vacuums up the mess the birds make in his apartment; nurses Tupelo; and bonds deeply with Connor, the only blue-crowned conure in the flock, an older bird who cannot find a mate or best friend. Connor is not unlike Bittner, a single man with thick glasses, a bushy beard and mustache, and a long ponytail who apparently has no close friends either.

“I don’t think of myself as an eccentric,” he says in his calm, relaxing voice.

Inspired by such Beat writers as Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac, Bittner is a kind of throwback, an easygoing Bohemian going with the flow, living for free without a paying job. “It wasn’t a plan; it just happened,” he says about his caring for the birds. “It was what I was doing while I was trying to figure out what that thing would be, my idea of where I was going to go in my life. But it became the thing that I’m doing. It’s magic that way.”

But that magic threatens to disappear when he is forced to leave his apartment and has to figure out what will happen to the birds.

Irving, who appears in the film, originally intended the project to be a short but ended up compiling thirty hours of 16mm footage over a few years on a shoestring budget. “When I first met him, I thought Mark was an inarticulate hippy recluse and he thought I was an ecofeminist lesbian,” she writes in a new article for Talkhouse. That changed as filming continued.

A companion piece to Bittner’s 2004 memoir of the same name (the book has the added subtitle A Love Story . . . with Wings), The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill is a tender and touching — and colorful — look at not just one man’s dedication to conures but the connection between humanity and nature, as well as the need for people to be a part of something, like a bird in a flock. We are not built for solitude. And that comes to fruition in a sweet shocker of a finale involving Irving (Pelican Dreams, Dark Circle), who will be at New Plaza Cinema for Q&As following the 6:10 screening on November 17 and the 2:40 shows on November 18 and 19.

Meanwhile, Bittner is working on his next book, Street Song, which will be accompanied by an album featuring such originals as “Poppa John,” “The Arrow You Want,” and “You’re So Peaceful” and covers of tunes by Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

REVERSE SHOT AT 20: SELECTIONS FROM A CENTURY: MANAKAMANA

MANAKAMANA

A mother and daughter eat ice cream in experimental documentary Manakamana

MANAKAMANA (Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez, 2013)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, November 18, 12:30, & Sunday, November 19, 3:30
Festival continues through November 26
www.manakamanafilm.com
movingimage.us

If you’re an adventurous filmgoer who likes to be challenged and surprised, the less you know about Pacho Velez and Stephanie Spray’s Manakamana, the better. But if you want to know more, here goes: Evoking such experimental films as Michael Snow’s Wavelength, Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma, and Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests as well as the more narrative works of such unique auteurs as Jim Jarmusch and Abbas Kiarostami, Manakamana is a beautiful, meditative journey that is sure to try your patience at first. The two-hour film, which requires a substantial investment on the part of the audience, takes place in a five-foot-by-five-foot cable car in Nepal that shuttles men, women, and children to and from the historic Manakamana temple, on a pilgrimage to worship a wish-fulfilling Hindu goddess. With Velez operating the stationary Aaton 7 LTR camera — the same one used by Robert Gardner for his 1986 documentary Forest of Bliss — and Spray recording the sound, the film follows a series of individuals and small groups as they either go to or return from the temple, traveling high over the lush green landscape that used to have to be traversed on foot before the cable car was built. A man and his son barely acknowledge each other; a woman carries a basket of flowers on her lap; an elderly mother and her middle-age daughter try to eat melting ice-cream bars; a pair of musicians play their instruments to pass the time.

A heavy metal band takes a picture of themselves in meditative documentary

A heavy metal band takes a picture of themselves in meditative documentary

Each trip has its own narrative, which must be partly filled in by the viewer as he or she studies the people in the cable car and the surroundings, getting continually jolted as the car glides over the joins. The film is a fascinating look into human nature and technological advances in this era of surveillance as the subjects attempt to act as normal as possible even though a camera and a microphone are practically in their faces. Produced at the Sensory Ethnography Laboratory at Harvard, Manakamana consists of eleven uncut shots of ten-to-eleven minutes filmed in 16mm, using rolls whose length roughly equals that of each one-way trip, creating a kind of organic symbiosis between the making and projecting of the work while adding a time-sensitive expectation on the part of the viewer.

A film well worth sticking around for till the very end — and one that grows less and less claustrophobic with each scene — Manakamana is screening November 18 and 19 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image series “Reverse Shot at 20: Selections from a Century,” honoring the twentieth anniversary of the film publication Reverse Shot, which has been its in-house journal since 2014; the two-month retrospective highlights twenty-first-century works touted by what was originally a stapled zine. Velez will be present at the November 19 show to discuss the film; both screenings will be preceded by the 2014 video Reverse Shot Talkie: Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez. “Spray and Velez’s film calls attention to attention, the ways our thoughts and perceptions slowly drift and return during long durations spent looking at certain subjects or familiar scenarios,” Leo Goldsmith wrote in Reverse Shot.