Jennie Livingston’s PARIS IS BURNING is part of MoMA celebration of Film Forum’s fortieth anniversary
40 YEARS OF DOCUMENTARY PREMIERES AT FILM FORUM
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
February 3-20
Tickets: $10, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
One of the most important, influential, and beloved independent cinema houses in the country, Film Forum has been presenting feature-length narratives, repertory series, and new documentaries since 1970. In 1972, Karen Cooper took over as director, helping Film Forum become the place to go for the best in international cinema. In honor of Film Forum’s fortieth anniversary, Cooper has curated an exciting retrospective of nonfiction works that premiered at the three-screen art house, which has been located on West Houston St. for two decades. The series includes such seminal documentaries as Nathaniel Kahn’s MY ARCHITECT, Bruce Weber’s LET’S GET LOST, Rudy Burckhardt’s UNDER THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE, Agnès Varda’s THE GLEANERS AND I, Terry Zwigoff’s CRUMB, Kevin Rafferty’s THE ATOMIC CAFÉ, D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’s THE WAR ROOM, and Jennie Livingston’s PARIS IS BURNING in addition to films by Werner Herzog, Frederick Wiseman, Mosco Boucault, Paul Cox, and others. On February 5 at 7:00, Cooper and George Griffin will introduce short films from Serious Business Company, including Griffin’s VIEWMASTER, Bruce Conner’s TAKE THE 5:10 TO DREAMLAND, Anita Thacher’s HOMAGE TO MAGRITTE, Scott Bartlett’s 1970, and Karen and David Crommie’s THE LIFE AND DEATH OF FRIDA KAHLO AS TOLD TO DAVID AND KAREN CROMMIE. This MoMA series is a marvelous way to celebrate one of the city’s shining jewels and, for those of you who have never been to Film Forum, to discover what the rest of us already know.
After playing film festivals around the world, Philippe Diaz’s THE END OF POVERTY? ran for one week last year at Village East and is now being rereleased at Cinema Village, bringing its critical take on the global financial crisis. Speaking with Nobel Prize winners, economists, writers, politicians, researchers, and other experts, Diaz attempts to get at the heart of international poverty — particularly by tugging at the audience’s heartstrings. He intercuts shots of talking heads discussing slavery and colonialism, the World Bank, the free market, the International Monetary Fund, and government bailouts with portraits of men, women, and children living in squalor in Africa, Latin America, the United States, and elsewhere. He supplements the film with a barrage of statistics that, individually, are infuriating but, taken as a whole, get lost in a whirlwind of numbers. Adding to the overkill is Martin Sheen’s over-the-top narration, which piles up yet more information and outrage. But even as the film sometimes feels like a Sally Struthers save-the-children infomercial, its crucial message does manage to pull through and take root — the money is out there, but its incredibly lopsided distribution in a warped system is basically set up to keep the imbalance that has led to such a tragic situation.
Toshiro Mifune is a lone samurai on the road following the end of the Tokugawa dynasty in Akira Kurosawa’s unforgettable masterpiece. Mifune comes to a town with two warring factions and plays each one off the other as a hired hand. Neo’s battles with myriad Agent Smiths are nothing compared to Yojimbo’s magnificent swordfights against growing bands of warriors that include one man with a gun. Try watching this film and not think of several Clint Eastwood Westerns as well as HIGH NOON.
In this YOJIMBO-like tale, Toshiro Mifune shows up in a small town looking for food and fast money and takes up with a rag-tag group of wimps who don’t trust him when he says he will help them against the powerful ruling gang. Funnier than most Kurosawa samurai epics, the film is unfortunately brought down a notch by a bizarre soundtrack that ranges from melodramatic claptrap to a jazzy big-city score.
Not to be confused with Li Yang’s 2003 film, BLIND SHAFT (MANG JING), which was also set in a rural Chinese coal-mining town, THE SHAFT (DIXIA DE TIANKONG) is a beautifully shot, mesmerizingly slow-paced debut feature from writer-director Zhang Chi. The story is told in three sections: In the first, Song Daming (Li Chen) overhears that his girlfriend, Ding Jingshui (Zheng Luoqian), might have slept with the boss to get a promotion, forcing him to reconsider their relationship. In the second, Ding Jingsheng (Huang Xuan), Jingshui’s brother, is a lazy slacker who is not smart enough to go to university, refuses to work in the mine, and instead thinks he could become a pop singer. And in the third, Ding Baogen (Luo Deyuan), Jingsheng and Jingshui’s father, has reached retirement age and is not sure what to do with the rest of his life, as the only thing he knows is the mine. THE SHAFT moves at a snail’s pace, reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch’s STRANGER THAN PARADISE but without any humor, a meditative examination of the decaying social and economic structure in rural China. Cinematographer Liu Shumi’s camera lingers on scenes long after they appear to be over, as characters just stand and stare out at the dim gray and black countryside, occasionally saturated in lush blues and reds; out there somewhere is Beijing, more than a dream away, but the big city doesn’t necessarily hold any answers either. Dialogue is kept to a bare minimum, with no musical soundtrack, just natural sound that often borders on complete silence. THE SHAFT, which is screening at MoMA January 21-27 as part of the Global Lens festival, is an intense, rewarding, uneasy experience from an extremely talented young filmmaker.