Andrea Mastrovito’s cutout installation brings paper creatures to life in “The Sixth Borough” exhibit on Governors Island (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
THE SIXTH BOROUGH
Governors Island, Colonels’ Row
Film series: July 16-18, 12 noon – 5:00 pm
Exhibit continues Friday – Sunday through September 25
Admission: free
www.nolongerempty.com
www.govisland.com
sixth borough slideshow
While the city, state, and federal governments debate over what to do with Governors Island, we continue to be the beneficiaries, as the island has become a home away from home for lovers of art, music, history, nature, and just about everything else under the sun. This weekend, July 16-18, from 12 noon to 5:00 each afternoon, No Longer Empty, which has organized the excellent site-specific installation “The Sixth Borough” in the rooms along Colonels’ Row, will be presenting “Not a Place, an Outlook,” short films that examine the relationship between place and the mind, with works by Julieta Aranda, Javier Tellez, Erin Shirreff, Steve Roden, Luke Fowler, and others. (The series repeats August 13-15 and September 10-12 and 17-19.) Also as part of the “The Sixth Borough,” Mary Walling Blackburn continues to offer tutorials on the second floor of Building 408 dealing with “Radical Citizenship,” one-on-one discussions between a visitor and such tutors as Regine Basha and Amir El Saffar (“Tuning Baghdad,” July 17), TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone and Blackburn (“Our Bad Relationship: The Revolutionary + the Policeman,” September 4), and A. B. Huber (“Due Vigilance: One Nation, Under God, Indivisible, on Alert,” September 17). Among the other highlights of the exhibit are Adam Cvijanovic’s trompe l’oeil paintings that imagine worlds beyond the walls; Andrea Mastovito’s massive “The Island of Dr. Mastrovito,” consisting of thousands of animals cut out of some seven hundred books, lining the walls and floor of one room, while a video of playfully re-created famous horror scenes screens in another; Teresa Diehl’s haunting projected video “Return of Pleasure,” which casts shadows of memories across scrims in the middle of a room; and Trong G. Nguyen’s “Marcel Duchamp Versus Bobby Fischer,” a three-channel video installation depicting a chess match as seen from above. And as long as you’re on the island already, you might also want to check out Ivy Baldwin Dance on Friday at 2:00, the free Gone to Governors concert with Caribou and Phantogram on Water Taxi Beach on Friday at 7:00, Let’s Fly a Kite! at noon on Saturday, the Big Apple Circus Family Fun Fest and the Jazz Age Dance Party with Michael Arenella and the Dreamland Orchestra on Saturday and Sunday, the Figment Sculpture Garden (complete with mini-golf course), and other special events and activities, most of which are free.
Claustrophobics, beware. Nearly all of Samuel Moaz’s microcosmic examination of the first day of the 1982 Israel-Lebanon war — the same struggle recently tackled by Ari Folman in the animated WALTZ WITH BASHIR — takes place within a dark, grungy tank. In this tiny space, audiences get to experience the fear building inside company leader Yigal (Michael Moshonov), driver Hertzel (Oshri Cohen), weapons loader Assi (Itay Tiran), and gunner Shmulik (Yoav Donat) as they are suddenly put in the middle of a secret, dangerous mission by commander Jamil (Zohar Strauss) and meet action head-on almost immediately, having to deal with the prospects of killing for the first time. The world outside the tank is seen only through the cross-hairs of Shmulik’s telescopic lens, making everyone outside a potential victim. At times the tension mounts at a breathtaking pace, although the film gets bogged down in too much melodrama as the characters get further developed. As a teenager, writer-director Moaz actually fought in the war, and it was his memories of having killed a man on that very day — June 6, 1982 — that led him to make the movie, which won the Silver Bear at the Venice Film Festival. LEBANON is quite a ride. This special Film Club advance screening at the Museum of Jewish Heritage will be followed by a discussion between Moaz and film critic Leonard Quart; LEBANON opens in theaters August 6.
We called Tetsuya Nakashima’s 2005 hit, KAMIKAZE GIRLS, the “otaku version of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s AMELIE,” referring to it as “fresh,” “frenetic,” “fast-paced,” and “very funny.” His following film, the stunningly gorgeous MEMORIES OF MATSUKO, also recalls AMELIE and all those other adjectives, albeit with much more sadness. Miki Nakatani stars as Matsuko, a sweet woman who spent her life just looking to be loved but instead found nothing but heartbreak, deception, and physical and emotional abuse. But MEMORIES OF MATSUKO is not a depressing melodrama, even if Nakashima incorporates touches of Douglas Sirk every now and again. The film is drenched in glorious Technicolor, often breaking out into bright and cheerful musical numbers straight out of a 1950s fantasy world. As the movie begins, Matsuko has been found murdered, and her long-estranged brother (Akira Emoto) has sent his son, Sho (Eita), who never knew she existed, to clean out her apartment. As Sho goes through the mess she left behind, the film flashes back to critical moments in Matsuko’s life — and he also meets some crazy characters in the present. It’s difficult rooting for the endearing Matsuko knowing what becomes of her, but Nakashima’s remarkable visual style will grab you and never let go. And like Audrey Tatou in AMELIE, Nakatani — who won a host of Japanese acting awards for her outstanding performance — is just a marvel to watch. The film was shown at the 2007 Japan Cuts festival and is being brought back this year by popular demand.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s marvelous — and very long, at nearly three and a half hours — study of Russian religious painter and monk Andrei Rublev is breathtaking in its epic scope and sublime beauty. Anatoli Solonitsyn stars in this primarily black-and-white tale that has the look and feel of an old classic Russian film from the 1930s (or earlier). It is about faith, about the earth, and about as slow moving as a film can get. The section about the bell is unforgettable. As with several of Tarkovsky’s films, it was cowritten by Andrei Konchalovsky, who made an attempt at Hollywood in the 1980s, churning out such terrible fare as HOMER & EDDIE and TANGO & CASH following a decent start with MARIA’S LOVERS and RUNAWAY TRAIN.
”Words can’t really express a person’s emotions. They’re too inert.” So says Andrei Tarkovsky in his 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.