this week in film and television

BIG SCREEN SUMMER NYFF58 REDUX: FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI

Hou Hsiao-hsien gem Flowers of Shanghai explores complex relationships between wealthy patrons and courtesans

FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI (HAI SHANG HUA) (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1998)
Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
July 2-20, $15
www.filmlinc.org

Taiwanese New Wave master Hou Hsiao-hsien might be the best filmmaker whose work you’ve never seen. For more than thirty-five years, he has been telling intimate, meditative stories about life, family, and relationships with a gentle, deeply intuitive style, infused with gorgeous visuals and subtly beautiful soundtracks. Film at Lincoln Center’s wide-ranging “Big Screen Summer: NYFF58 Redux” continues with one of the New York Film Festival staple’s most elegant tales, Flowers of Shanghai. The 1998 film, being shown in a dramatic 4K restoration, is set in brothels, known as flower houses, in 1884 in the British Concession, where men and women congregate for social interaction and develop long-term bonds and responsibilities to one another based on much more than just sex. The men play drinking games, smoke opium, and buy the women gifts. The story, told in a series of vignettes as Mark Lee Ping Bin’s camera slowly moves through dark, lush, reddish gas-lit interiors, focuses on Master Wang (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), who has promised to be the sole patron of Crimson (Michiko Hada) but who has also been secretly seeing the younger Jasmin (Vicky Wei) and lavishing her with presents. The elder Master Hong (Luo Tsai-erh) and Auntie Huang (Rebecca Pan), the madam, discuss the situation, bringing up issues of responsibility and honesty, attempting to come to some kind of understanding in an exchange that shows respect for both the men and women who are a far cry from the Western conception of johns and prostitutes.

Most scenes end by fading quietly to black, then introducing the woman protagonist of the next section — Crimson, Jasmin, Pearl (Carina Lau), Jade (Shuan Fang), and Emerald (Michelle Reis) — as the women gossip and Crimson and Hong, and other pairs, try to figure out what they want out of life and from one another. In Flowers of Shanghai, Hou explores class differences, gender roles, the Asian notion of saving face, and intimacy with grace and sophistication. When the film fades out for the final time, viewers are left knowing they’ve just experienced something special, a stunning work that uses the technologies of cinema to delve into the very nature of humanity.

“Big Screen Summer: NYFF58 Redux” runs through August 26 with such other 2020 film festival favorites as Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk, Eugène Green’s Atarrabi and Mikelats, John Gianvito’s Her Socialist Smile, William Klein’s Muhammad Ali, the Greatest, Nuria Giménez’s My Mexican Bretzel, Philippe Lacôte’s Night of the Kings, and Orson Welles’s Hopper/Welles, an epic conversation between Welles and Dennis Hopper.

KENNY SCHARF: WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE

Min Sanchez, Kenny Scharf, and Oliver Sanchez pose in front of Scharf’s artwork in Bahia, Brazil (photo by Tereza Scharf)

KENNY SCHARF: WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE (Malia Scharf & Max Basch, 2020)
Available on demand
www.kennyscharfmovie.com

“I have a balancing act between being a responsible adult and the Peter Pan syndrome because I just feel like life is so much about the moment, so I want every moment fun and beautiful,” Kenny Scharf says in the new documentary Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide. “It’s not reality.” Codirectors Max Basch and Malia Scharf — one of the artist’s daughters — try to make every moment of the film, now streaming on demand, fun and beautiful, often reaching that goal.

Shot over a period of eleven years, When Worlds Collide follows Scharf, who was born in 1958 in Los Angeles and moved to Manhattan to attend SVA, from his early days as a graffiti artist and muralist, when he met and became great friends with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat and hung out with Andy Warhol at the Factory, to his vast popularity creating fantastical, colorful creatures in paintings and sculptures, from the lean years to his current obsession with recycling. “Use everything,” he says, extolling us to ”not waste precious plastic when you can turn it into bathroom sculpture” as he adds a plastic cup and straw to an ever-evolving work above his toilet.

Scharf and Basch, who also served as editor and one of the cinematographers, speak with former Ferus Gallery owner Irving Blum, art collector Peter Brant, gallerists Jeffrey Deitch and Tony Shafrazi, writer and poet Carter Ratcliff, art historian Richard Marshall, Whitney curator Jane Panetta, former Scharf assistant Min Sanchez, author and psychologist Gabor Maté, collectors Andy and Christine Hall, real estate developer Tony Goldman, and curator Dan Cameron, who all offer unique perspectives on Scharf as a person and an artist. “There’s no separation between Kenny and his art,” his friend and fellow artist Kitty Brophy says. There are also old and new interviews with such artists as Bruno Schmidt, Ed Ruscha, Samantha McEwen, Robert Williams, Marilyn Minter, KAWS, Dennis Hopper, and Yoko Ono as well as Scharf’s mother, Rose; wife, Tereza; daughters, Zena and Malia; and grandkids Jet and Lua, who share their thoughts and are seen in home movie footage.

“He just created a family where we felt we were understood and accepted for who we are,” actress and performance artist Ann Magnuson says. “The main way to communicate was to get out on the street, and the message got out there and of course the attention came, and then it started to unravel a bit when the success, the money, the fame, and the uptown world started paying attention to the downtown world. Some of that wonderful, naïve idealism was lost.”

The film doesn’t shy away from the devastation of the AIDS crisis or Scharf’s dry periods, when his style of surreal Pop art was out of favor, but he continues to create and is a fan favorite at international art fairs with his eye-catching work. He gets tearful when talking about Haring, shares his love of nature and cartoons (especially The Flintstones and The Jetsons), collects trash on the beach, remembers the influential Club 57, discusses his breakthrough painting, 1984’s When the Worlds Collide, and describes his penchant for pareidolia, seeing faces everywhere. It’s fascinating to watch him stand in front of a canvas, painting right from his imagination, without preparatory sketches. He comes off as a driven artist and dedicated family man who can be an endearing mensch. “Many people think I’m crazy, and I think that’s okay,” he says with a laugh.

AGAINST THE CURRENT

AGAINST THE CURRENT (Óskar Páll Sveinsson, 2020)
Quad Cinemas
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through July 1
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com

After watching Óskar Páll Sveinsson’s Against the Current, you may not want to kayak around the entire island of Iceland, but you’ll probably want to start planning a trip to this extraordinary Scandinavian nation. In May 2019, Veiga Grétarsdóttir set off from her picturesque hometown of Ísafjörð on a three-plus-month, 1,250-mile journey circumnavigating the entire country in a sixteen-foot solo kayak, paddling counterclockwise, against the current, something that had never been done before. Following her along the coastline, in a fishing boat, and using drones, director and cinematographer Oskar Pall Sveinsson documented the hazardous expedition in vivid detail in the new documentary Against the Current, a film that features a barrage of spectacular shots not only of the sea and the topography of Iceland but of humanity’s tiny place in the world, set to a score by Högni Egilsson.

Along the way, Sveinsson also tells the story of Grétarsdóttir’s recent transition to becoming a woman; born male, she participated in rugged sports when she was younger but also hid what she considered a shameful secret: a compulsion to wear women’s clothing. As a man, she married a woman and had a daughter, but she ultimately decided to go through the surgery to change her gender and then prove to herself and others her physical and emotional strength by kayaking around Iceland. Sveinsson cuts between the treacherous trip and photographs and videos from Grétarsdóttir’s childhood and marriage, with her parents, friends, daughter, and doctors sharing stories about her; every single one accepts her transition, although it was perhaps most difficult for her ex-wife. “I often say that switching your gender like that is the biggest and most complex change you can make in your life,” psychiatrist Óttar Guðmundsson, who was part of Grétarsdóttir’s transgender team, explains. “You can’t change your life more drastically than that.”

Against the Current documents Veiga Grétarsdóttir’s remarkable story

Grétarsdóttir was initially joined by three kayakers, including Örlygur Sigurjónsson, who stuck around the longest, but ultimately she was left on her own, as expected. She would paddle for as many as thirteen hours a day, then pull over onto the coast, eat, and sleep in a tent, occasionally coming into contact with local people. One such supporter was sheep farmer Elisabet Petursdottir, who says, “I feel, regarding all the prejudice, that you’re not supposed to discuss things. All talk is shut down. It would be better to talk about things and solve the problems instead of creating them. In my opinion, everybody should have an open mind. Thank God we are all not made from the same mold. People must be allowed to be as they are.”

Grétarsdóttir holds nothing back, delving deep into aspects of her life that involved depression and even suicide attempts. She hopes that completing the circumnavigation will help her as well as others dealing with issues of personal identity. “I’ve dreamed of it for a long time, but having gone through everything, the transitioning, I decided to live my life, make my dreams come true,” she says. And every step of the way, there are visuals that will take your breath away. The film continues at the Quad through July 1; you can watch a Zoom interview with Grétarsdóttir and Sveinsson (Under the Surface, Ransacked) hosted by the Gene Siskel Film Center here.

ANIMAL WISDOM

Heather Christian bares her heart and soul in glorious online show Animal Wisdom

Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company / American Conservatory Theater
Through June 27, $19-$49
heatherchristian.com

A few minutes into Woolly Mammoth’s stream of Heather Christian’s pandemic-filmed Animal Wisdom, I grew terribly upset with myself: How in the world did I miss this remarkable show when it premiered at the Bushwick Starr in 2017?

Extended on demand through June 27, this new iteration of Animal Wisdom is an intimate and rapturous confessional of music and storytelling, an ingenious journey into the personal and communal nature of ritual and superstition, of grief and loss, of ghosts and, most intently, the fear of death. Presented by DC’s Woolly Mammoth and San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, the 135-minute show is a movie/theater/concert hybrid and a melding of public séance and stirring revival meeting, with film direction by Amber McGinnis and stage direction by Emilyn Kowaleski. They create a unique and special experience that the audience can feel a part of even though they are at home watching a recording, which is especially enhanced if they follow Christian’s request that each viewer gather four elements so they can participate in the proceedings.

“This performance was never supposed to happen on film,” Christian says directly into the camera early on. “I guess that’s obvious. But contrary to what it looks like, it wasn’t supposed to happen in a theater either. It was supposed to happen in a defunct church or holy space, but houses of any kind are deconsecrated and reconsecrated all the time, so I guess we’re not so far off. Anyways, maybe at least yours is already haunted.”

Animal Wisdom was filmed onstage at DC’s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Singer-songwriter and pianist Christian is joined by her band, guitarist and cellist Sasha Brown, bassists Fred Epstein and B. E. Farrow, percussionist Eric Farber, and violinist Maya Sharpe, as she travels back to her hometown of Natchez, Mississippi, sharing tales about her deceased grandparents amid original songs that range from country and blues to folk and gospel, with such titles as “Well Made Fish,” “Wild Thing’s Daughter,” “Dies Irae” (“Day of Wrath”), and “Libera Me,” eschewing conventional hook-laden sing-along pop and standard theatrical orchestrations. She makes regular comparisons between her relatives and such animals and insects as mosquitoes, birds, coyotes, elephants, cicadas, and cats, which explains the name of the work.

“When I say ‘Love is in the garden,’” she says after singing that song, “I mean that. I mean that because: When my grandma Heloise died, she up and put herself in the plants, and so I go to the garden to talk to her and rip up weeds when I am heartbroken. When I say ‘Grandmother’s a red bird’ — I mean that too. When my grandmother Geraldine died, she threw her ghost into a cardinal. As a bird, she was hard to pin down for conversation so I tattooed a red feather on my arm. Hasn’t totally worked if Imma be honest. When I say Grandaddy’s in the car, he is, and when I say ‘Praise be the wrecking ball,’ I mean my brain. That one’s a metaphor. I don’t know about you but my brain is a wrecking ball.”

She later admits, “The women in my matrilineal line are New Orleans Catholics who are also musicians who suffer migraines and talk to dead people. There are three of us. Ella, Heloise, Heather. Skipped my mom. Don’t know what that’s about.”

Director of photography Aiden Korotkin follows Christian — primarily wearing a “Lux Aeterna” T-shirt, the communion antiphon for the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass — as she moves about Christopher Bowser’s intricately designed stage, from pianos to a carousel slideshow with theater seats, from a small table with an old telephone (with a cord) to a shrine to her grandma Ella, from various lamps and candles to a soda vending machine and other unexpected items, centered on a circle of overlapping rugs to give it a homey feel. She and the band also wander through Woolly Mammoth’s hallways and lobby, reminding us of the physical space of theater.

An NYU grad, film composer, and leader of the band Heather Christian & the Arbornauts, Christian is spellbinding in Animal Wisdom, capturing our attention from the very beginning and never letting go as she openly and honestly details critical moments in her life, her dark eyes and round face captivating. Christian is a multitalented creator who has recently released the audio work Prime: A Practical Breviary for Playwrights Horizons and the video collaboration I Am Sending You the Sacred Face for Theater in Quarantine on YouTube, and she will premiere the Covid-delayed Oratorio for Living Things at Ars Nova next spring. She leaves nothing behind in Animal Wisdom, one of the best virtual shows to come out during the pandemic, baring her heart and soul, a magnetic force in full command of the stage, her supporting cast, and her bewitched audience.

“I’m gonna tell you what I think about the soul,” she says to us. “So we should make friends real quick, ’cause that’s heavy. Hum with me like this?” I dare you not to listen to her and hum along; it’s impossible to not join Christian on this fabulous interactive ride through metaphorical and metaphysical ghosts that haunt us all.

STAGE DOOR MIXER

Who: Kathryn Allison, Jacqueline B. Arnold, DeMarius R. Copes, Robyn Hurder, Clyde Alves, Ashley Loren, Isabelle McCalla, Alise Morales, Stephanie Park, Demi Remick, Jelani Remy, Daniel Quadrino, Jessica Vosk, Olivia Puckett
What: Live music benefit for the Actors Fund
Where: Watermark Bar, 78 South St., Pier 15
When: Monday, June 21, $40, 8:00
Why: The outdoor Watermark Bar, jutting out on Pier 15 on South St., celebrates the return of live music and theater to New York City with a benefit concert on June 21 at 8:00, raising funds for the Actors Fund, which has done an extraordinary job helping the entertainment community during the Covid-19 crisis. “Stage Door Mixer” will feature performances by Kathryn Allison, Jacqueline B. Arnold, DeMarius R. Copes, Robyn Hurder and Clyde Alves, Ashley Loren, Isabelle McCalla, Alise Morales, Stephanie Park, Demi Remick, Jelani Remy, Daniel Quadrino, and Jessica Vosk, with Olivia Puckett serving as host. In addition, the audience will be treated to a sneak peek screening of Australian dancer and choreographer Reed Luplau’s short film Places, Please, starring Danny Burstein, Krysta Rodriguez, Pixie Aventura, Ben Cook, Deborah S. Craig, Joseph Haro, and Bahiyah Hibah in a story about a therapy session for artists struggling during the pandemic.

BROADWAY BARES 2021: TWERK FROM HOME

Who: More than 170 dancers, Harvey Fierstein, J. Harrison Ghee, Jay Armstrong Johnson, Robyn Hurder, Peppermint, Jelani Remy
What: Annual benefit for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS
Where: Broadway Cares, YouTube
When: Sunday, June 20, free, 9:00
Why: Last year, the annual “Broadway Bares” benefit, in which performers take it off for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, went virtual, and the 2021 edition follows suit with “Twerk from Home.” On June 20 at 9:00, vaxxed and waxed performers will show us what they got from their homes, where they’ve spent so much of the past fifteen months because of the pandemic lockdown, and from across the city now that we are opening up again. Directed by “Bares” creator and Tony winner Jerry Mitchell with codirectors Laya Barak and Nick Kenkel, the free evening features more than a dozen high-concept videos from choreographers Barak, Kenkel, John Alix, Al Blackstone, Frank Boccia, Karla Garcia, Jonathan Lee, Ray Mercer, Dylan Pearce, Jenn Rose, Luis Salgado, Michael Lee Scott, Gabriella Sorretino, Kellen Stancil, Rickey Tripp, and James Alonzo White, with appearances by more than 170 dancers, leading up to a grand finale recorded in Times Square.

Donations are strongly encouraged if you can afford it; 2020’s online event raised more than half a million dollars, which sounds great until you realize that the 2019 in-person benefit took in more than two mil. “Being back with the ‘Broadway Bares’ family to create ‘Twerk from Home’ has been an incredible reminder of how beautiful our theater community is, both inside and out,” Mitchell said in a statement. “Creating one more virtual edition of our beloved celebration in safe environments reinforces our belief that the best way to take care of ourselves is to take care of each other.” In addition, there will be special appearances by Harvey Fierstein, J. Harrison Ghee, Jay Armstrong Johnson (in a revealing opener), Robyn Hurder, Peppermint (in a new song, “Strip”), and Jelani Remy.

JULIE MEHRETU / PALIMPSEST / PRIDE CELEBRATION

Julie Mehretu, Ghosthymn (after the Raft), ink and acrylic on canvas, 2019–21 (photo by Tom Powel Imaging / © Julie Mehretu / courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery)

JULIE MEHRETU
Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort St.
Exhibit continues Thursday – Monday through August 8, $18-$25
Palimpsest: Thursday, June 17, free with RSVP, 8:00 (available on demand June 18-20)
Pride Celebration with Julie Mehretu: Friday, June 25, free with RSVP, 7:00
212-570-3600
whitney.org

Over the years, I’ve seen many works by Julie Mehretu, but her eponymously titled midcareer retrospective at the Whitney is still a revelation. Running through August 8, the show consists of approximately thirty paintings and forty works on paper and prints from 1996 to the present by the Ethiopian-born artist, who moved with her family to Michigan when she was seven in 1977 and is now based in Harlem. Her large canvases are palimpsests of architectural urban maps, news clippings, allegorical references, economic charts, art history, and abstract lines and shapes, coming together to form a tantalizing whole that is both visually dazzling and empowered with meaning. “Mehretu analyzes and reimagines divergent cultural narratives through her own artistic methodology; an extraordinary thinker and observer, she produces work that is full of empathy, innovation, complexity, and contradiction,” LACMA CEO and director Michael Govan writes in the forward to the catalog.

Installation view of “Julie Mehretu” at the Whitney, with Cairo, 2013, and Invisible Line (collective), 2010-11 (photo by Ron Amstutz)

As captivating as her works are from a distance, the exhibition rewards visitors who spend time with them at close range, their face as near as permissible to the smooth surfaces to take in every detail. “Few artistic encounters are more thrilling than standing close to one of her large canvases, enveloped in its fullness, color, forms, and symbolic content,” Whitney director Adam D. Weinberg writes in his catalog introduction. “One is easily swept up, into, and away by the works’ informational overload and force field of visually magnetic strokes, lines, routes, and trajectories. Viewers can, and do, lose their bearings in the attempt to read, comprehend, locate themselves, and make meaning from the confrontation.”

Julie Mehretu, Stadia II, ink and acrylic on canvas, 2004 (Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg; gift of Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn and Nicolas Rohatyn and A. W. Mellon Acquisition Endowment Fund 2004.50 / photo courtesy the Carnegie Museum, © Julie Mehretu)

Such ink-on-acrylic canvases as Conjured Parts (eye), Ferguson, Haka (and Riot), (A Painting in Four Parts) Part 1, Transcending: The New International, and Retopistics: A Renegade Excavation are prime examples of the virtuosity of her technique, from her delicate brushwork to her attention to the smallest of elements, as she explores such issues as migration, colonialism, white supremacy, and racial injustice. Meanwhile, ink-on-paper drawings such as her “Inkcity” series delve into the psychology behind her vision. “I was really interested in mining myself and who I was and what made me,” Mehretu says in a Whitney video. “My interest is not in trying to dictate or determine or explain or try to give any information to anyone in that way. There aren’t any directives or any proposals in these paintings. These paintings are really experiential paintings that are informed by the time, by me, by this moment, by trying to digest that.”

Julie Mehretu, Epigraph, Damascus, photogravure, sugar lift aquatint, spit bite aquatint, and open bite on six panels, 2016 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Kelvin and Hana Davis through the 2018 Collectors Committee M.2018.188a–f, printed by BORCH Editions, Copenhagen, © Julie Mehretu)

The centerpiece is Ghosthymn (after the Raft), a large-scale canvas that has its own space opposite a window looking out at the Hudson River, David Hammons’s Day’s End, and the recently opened pier park known as Little Island. Created specifically for the Whitney show, the work references Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa as well as New York City’s past. “The insistence on new work and the idea of how that’s important . . . there was this time of suspension with the pandemic,” Mehretu says in the video. “There’s a wall that faces the river, and I was really interested in that wall and the relationship to the river and the relationship to the exterior. As you look out — I look at it every day from my studio [in Chelsea] — you sense the nineteenth-century-ness of this city even though so much of the architecture has changed. The Hudson River is the reason the city exists. There’s a sensibility in different periods of life, of the history of the making of this place, and the kind of immigrant nature of this place.” From a distance, bursts of red, yellow, and green battle it out with ghostly whites, but up close you’re likely to be surprised by what Mehretu uses to create some of her smaller images.

Julie Mehretu works on Haka (and Riot) in new documentary Julie Mehretu: Palimpsest (photo courtesy Checkerboard Film Foundation)

Mehretu was intimately involved with the survey, which began at LACMA before coming to New York City; she is extremely generous on the audio guide when talking about her process, a must-listen. You can also find out more when the museum premieres the documentary Julie Mehretu: Palimpsest from June 17 to 20, introduced by exhibition cocurator Rujeko Hockley and Checkerboard Film Foundation president Edgar Howard. And on June 24 at 7:00, Mehretu will be at the Whitney for a special in-person Pride celebration with DJ Reborn and refreshments, during which the ravishing exhibition will be open.