this week in film and television

FIRST SATURDAYS: BLACK HISTORY MONTH

Become a Brooklyn Museum 1stfan for $20 and receive a free limited-edition print of Valerie Hegarty’s “First Harvest in the Wilderness with Pileated Woodpecker,” inspired by Asher Durand

Brooklyn Museum of Art
200 Eastern Parkway
Saturday, February 6, free after 5:00 (some events require advance free tickets available an hour or two before showtime)
718-638-5000
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum’s monthly First Saturdays program celebrates Black History Month with another evening of free activities, featuring live performances by the Igmar Thomas Group, Impact Repertory Theatre, and Dja-rara, screenings of Jeremy Robins and Magali Damas’s 2008 Haitian documentary THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WATER and Mel Stuart’s 1973 classic WATTSTAX, a Hands-On wearable art workshop, gallery tours, a book club meeting discussing THE BLACK BODY, and a Mardi Gras dance party hosted by DJ Ian Friday. Also, 1stfans will receive a free print by Valerie Hegarty. In addition, all of the exhibitions will be open, including “Healing the Wounds of War: The Brooklyn Sanitary Fair of 1864,” “Body Parts: Ancient Egyptian Fragments and Amulets,” and “From the Village to Vogue: The Modernist Jewelry of Art Smith.”

THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC

Dreyer classic will get impassioned screening with live music at Encounter festival

THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC (Carl Th. Dreyer, 1928)
New York Marriott Marquis, sixth floor
1535 Broadway
Sunday, January 17, $30, 8:00
www.crossroadsculturalcenter.org

As part of the New York Encounter festival, Carl Th. Dreyer’s controversial 1928 classic silent film, THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC, will be screened at the Marriott Marquis, accompanied by a live performance of Richard Einhorn’s “Voices of Light,” the composer’s 1994 oratorio inspired by the film. The composition will be performed by the Metro Chamber Orchestra, directed by Phil Nuzzo, and the Communion and Liberation Choir, directed by Christopher Vath. The film stars Renée Jeanne Falconetti, in her second and final movie role, as the title character, facing her final days. Dreyer (ORDET, VAMPYR) created a stunning look for the film, featuring extreme close-ups that get right in the viewer’s face. Thought to be lost, the complete film was discovered in a Norwegian mental institution in 1981 and ultimately released on DVD by Criterion.

NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL

EYES WIDE OPEN examines forbidden passion at Jewish Film Festival

Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
January 13-28, $11
212-721-6500
www.filmlinc.com

The nineteenth annual Jewish Film Festival at Lincoln Center consists of thirty-two films, nearly every one a New York or U.S. premiere, examining topics both familiar and new, including photojournalism, Israeli cinema, WWII, the Middle East, religious tradition, homosexuality, anti-Semitism, and activism, ranging from Michaël Prazan’s three-hour EINSATGRUPPEN: THE DEATH BRIGADES to Adam Elliot’s claymation MARY AND MAX and restorations of Henry Lynn’s BAR MITZVAH (1935) and Falk Harnack’s THE AXE OF WANDSBEK (1951). This year’s crop once again comes from all over the Jewish diaspora, with feature-length narratives, shorts, and documentaries from Australia, Germany, France, Poland, Belgium, Romania, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, the UK, Israel, and the United States. Ludi Boeken’s SAVIORS IN THE NIGHT, about German farmers protecting a Jewish family during World War II, is the opening-night selection, while Marleen Gorris’s WITHIN THE WHIRLWIND, about the struggles of poet and teacher Evgenia Ginzburg (Emily Watson), is the closing-night choice. Many of the films will feature introductions or postscreening discussions with directors, producers, and subjects. In addition to the Walter Reade Theater, several special screenings will take place at the JCC in Manhattan and the Jewish Museum.

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE / RONI HORN / ALICE GUY BLACHÉ / OMER FAST

Roni Horn, “Becoming a Landscape,” detail, twenty chromogenic prints, 1999–2001 / © Roni Horn

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St.
Wednesday – Sunday 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
Admission: $18 (Pay-what-you-wish Fridays 6:00 – 9:00)
212-570-3600
www.whitney.org

This might be the last weekend to catch “Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction,” an examination of the painter’s development from dark abstract works to her more familiar, repetitive flowery canvases that often feature a palette tailor-made for warm-weather living rooms (however, be sure not to miss the room of intimate photographs of O’Keeffe taken by her longtime lover, Alfred Stieglitz), but there’s a little more time to see the far more interesting and rewarding “Roni Horn AKA Roni Horn,” which runs through January 24. In this wide-ranging midcareer retrospective, Horn searches for the nature of identity in photography, sculpture, drawing, and installation, incorporating images of landscape and language while playing with perception and duality. Horn forces the viewer to question their own place in an ever-changing world in such works as “You are the weather,” comprising one hundred photos of the same woman in Iceland gazing into the camera, her mood shifting based on how hot or cold she is; “Becoming a Landscape,” in which Horn places side by side pairs of photographs taken an instant apart, with only the barest hint of difference evident; “This Is me, This is you,” two large grids of multiple pictures taken of her niece over a few years, consisting of pairs of shots that seem like duplicates but are not; and “Dead Owl,” two pictures of the title subject that are indeed the same. Spread over two floors, “Roni Horn AKA Roni Horn” offers a unique and fascinating perspective on both art and reality.

Alice Guy Blaché, A HOUSE DIVIDED, 1913 (courtesy of the Library of Congress MBRS Division / photograph by George Willeman)

Also continuing through January 24 is “Alice Guy Blaché: Cinema Pioneer,” screenings of the little-seen films of the first woman director and studio owner, a series of shorts and longer works that are worth sitting down and spending time with in the Kaufman Astoria Studios Film & Video & Video Galleries, while “Omer Fast: Nostalgia,” in the first-floor Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Gallery through February 14, displays Fast’s three-part film that investigates fact vs. fiction, reality vs. invention. (Fast fans can also check out his new exhibit at Postmasters in Chelsea, which includes the videos TAKE A DEEP BREATH and DE GROTE BOODSCHAP.)

NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL: MARY AND MAX

Max becomes friends with an Australian girl in charming claymation film

MARY AND MAX (Adam Elliot, 2009)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
70 Lincoln Center Plaza, 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Saturday, January 23, 9:00
Sunday, January 24, 8:45
212-875-5601
www.maryandmax.com
www.filmlinc.com

Winner of numerous awards at film festivals all over the world, Adam Elliot’s stop-motion animated MARY AND MAX is the touching, unforgettable tale of two loners who become pen pals, sharing the details of their hopes and dreams over decades. Mary (voiced by Bethany Whitmore as a young girl and Toni Collette when she gets older) is an oddball child living in a small town in Australia. Seeking a friend, she sends a letter to a random person she finds in a phone book. Max (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a childlike middle-aged man suffering from Asperger’s Disorder in New York City. Through the years, their long-distance relationship goes through emotional ups and downs, building to a surprising ending that still has us scratching our heads. Elliot, who won an Oscar for his short film HARVIE KRUMPET in 2003, wrote, directed, and designed the sets and characters for MARY AND MAX, inspired by the photography of Diane Arbus. He brings Mary and Max to life in charming ways, adding little details and flourishes that will endear you to them even though they both are very, very strange. The film, wonderfully narrated by Barry “Dame Edna” Humphries, required more than 130,000 individual frames and 212 puppets and took 57 weeks to shoot; the result is simply charming. MARY AND MAX is being shown this weekend at Lincoln Center as part of the New York Jewish Film Festival; executive producer Paul Hardart will be in attendance at the January 23 screening. (The film is also part of the Reel Abilities: NY Disabilities Film Festival running January 28 – February 2, presented by the JCC in Manhattan.)

GLOBAL LENS, 2010: DIOSES (GODS)

DIOSES is a biting slice-of-life portrait of the Peruvian upper class (courtesy Global Film Initiative)

DIOSES (GODS) (Josué Méndez, 2008)
MoMA Film
Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Thursday, January 14, 4:00 & Saturday, January 23, 1:30
Series runs January 14-29
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
www.diosesthemovie.com

Named Best Peruvian Feature at the 2008 Lima Film Festival and Best Film at the Biarritz Film Festival, DIOSES (GODS) opens the seventh annual Global Lens series at MoMA, which promotes socially relevant works from developing nations. Written and directed by Josué Méndez (DÍAS DE SANTIAGO), DIOSES takes a biting look at the exclusive Peruvian upper class. While wealthy industrialist Agustín (Edgar Saba) is introducing his young fiancée, Elisa (Maricielo Effio), to snooty society people spending the summer at a fancy beach retreat, his daughter, Andrea (Anahí de Cárdenas), is drinking and drugging herself to sleep every night at wild parties, not remembering whom she slept with, as her tortured brother, Diego (Sergio Gjurinovic), pines away for her physical love. Elisa, from a poor family, studies to try to fit in, reading books on gardening and mythology to keep up with the other women and refusing to allow her mother and grandmother to visit for fear that her lower-class roots will spoil her entrée. Meanwhile, Agustín is trying to prepare his son to join him at the factory, but Diego seems more concerned with peeking at and touching his sister’s body as she sleeps off another crazy night. Featuring beautiful cinematography by Mario Bassino, DIOSES is an intelligent slice-of-life portrait of the shallow, materialistic relationships among the Peruvian upper class, a socially conscious depiction of the vapid emptiness of connection they have with each other, themselves, and the real world.

The Global Lens series also includes Bui Thac Chuyen’s Vietnamese drama CHOI VOI (ADRIFT), Lyes Salem’s Algerian tale MASCARADES (MASQUERADES), Alejandro Gerber Bicecci’s Mexican story VAHO (BECLOUD), Granaz Moussavi’s MY TEHRAN FOR SALE from Iran, Enrique Buchichio’s EL CUARTO DE LEO (LEO’S ROOM) from Mexico, Rajesh Shera’s Indian tragedy OCEAN OF AN OLD MAN, and Zang Chi’s highly regarded Chinese film DIXIA DE TIANKONG (THE SHAFT).

KUROSAWA FESTIVAL: I LIVE IN FEAR

Toshiro Mifune lives in fear in Kurosawa classic

I LIVE IN FEAR (IKIMONO NO KIROKU) (Akira Kurosawa, 1955)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Thursday, January 21, 1:00, 3:45, 5:30, 7:45, 10:00
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

Akira Kurosawa’s powerful psychological drama begins with a jazzy score over shots of a bustling Japanese city, people anxiously hurrying through as a Theremin joins the fray. But this is no Hollywood film noir or low-budget frightfest; Kurosawa’s daring film is about the end of old Japanese society as the threat of nuclear destruction hovers over everyone. A completely unrecognizable Toshiro Mifune stars as Nakajima, an iron foundry owner who wants to move his large family — including his two mistresses — to Brazil, which he believes to be the only safe place on the planet where he can survive the H bomb. His immediate family, concerned more about the old man’s money than anything else, takes him to court to have him declared incompetent; there he meets a dentist (the always excellent Takashi Shimura) who also mediates such problems — and fears that Nakajima might be the sanest one of all.