this week in film and television

TRIBECA FILM: REPUBLIQUE, THE INTERACTIVE MOVIE

REPUBLIQUE, THE INTERACTIVE MOVIE (Simon Bouisson, 2019)
Tribeca Film: Outdoor & Interactive Experiences
tribecafilm.com
republique-le-film.fr/en

Created by director Simon Bouisson and writer Olivier Demangel, Republique, the Interactive Movie is a gripping virtual thriller that plays out in real time over your mobile device as a terrorist attack hits the Paris Metro. Instead of weaving between three stories, the film allows the viewer to choose which part to watch when by scrolling from one to the other; in essence, you are the editor, selecting what to follow as if you are on your phone and the events are happening live, breaking news erupting in the palm of your hand. As the tragedy unfolds, the visuals are accompanied by comments and emojis posted by fictional characters, who question what the characters are doing, cheer them on, and offer advice as the danger increases. Lucie (Lyna Khoudri) and Rio (Rio Vega) are broadcasting their “urbex” on social media when the attack starts, sending them deep underground, searching for a safe way out. Antoine (Jean-Baptiste Lafarge) and Boris (Nicolas Avinée) are a pair of lawyers on a subway platform, getting ready for a night out with friends, when things go haywire. And journalist Rudy (Xavier Lacaille) meets Nora (Noémie Merlant), who is desperately trying to find her husband, Djibril (Radouan Leflahi), who is lost amid the chaos.

The details of the plot are based on interviews the filmmakers did with psychologists and victim-support charities, focusing on not only the intense action but the reaction of the characters as the situation grows more dire. The claustrophobic nature of the seventy-minute film is palpable as people run through dark tunnels and ominous corridors and wonder what is behind the next closed door while you watch on your small phone, unable to help in any way, trapped along with them. The experience is particularly potent after a year of quarantine, when so much of the world was unable to see friends and family or go to the movies, instead relegated to home screens and personal devices. Bouisson (Jour de vote, Tokyo Reverse) and Demangel (111, Atlantique) keep everything moving swiftly, but there’s no need to panic if you’re a completist or you think you missed something important; at the end of the film, you are given access to scenes that can fill in any holes or that you want to check out again.

David Mendizábal: eat me!

Who: David Mendizábal
What: Livestreamed presentation
Where: Soho Rep. YouTube
When: Thursday, June 17, free with RSVP, 7:00
Why: During the pandemic, Soho Rep. started Project Number One, in which eight artists were paid as salaried staff members, earning $1,250 per week plus health insurance to develop new work while shining a light on the problems creators faced as theaters closed and Covid-19 spread around the world. Becca Blackwell, Shayok Misha Chowdhury, Stacey Derosier, David Mendizábal, Ife Olujobi, David Ryan Smith, Carmelita Tropicana, and Jillian Walker met regularly to discuss what comes next for theater makers. In May, Smith released The Story of a Circle, a personal tale in which he pulls no punches from Walkerspace, and Tropicana is posting her podcast That’s Not What Happened here.

On June 17, director and designer Mendizábal will begin streaming his contribution, eat me! Describing the show, he writes, “They say that every seven years we essentially become new people, because in that time, every old cell in our body has been replaced by a new cell through a process known as autophagy. Autophagy literally translates to ‘self-eating,’ which got me thinking: What are the parts of myself, or ideas I’ve held on to / that I would eat away if I could? / What would I replace those ideas with?” The film is inspired by an Ecuadorian ritual in which people share “guaguas de pan,” or bread babies, with their lost loved ones on November 2, Día de los Difuntos (Day of the Deceased). Mendizábal (On the Grounds of Belonging, Tell Hector I Miss Him) sees his film, which is edited by Yee Eun Nam, with music and sound by Mauricio Escamilla and animation by Jeromy Velasco, as “a release and a rebirth” as we return to life together.

BIG SCREEN SUMMER NYFF58 REDUX: SMALL AXE

Steve McQueen’s Small Axe consists of five powerful stories of racism and harassment of West Indian immigrants in London from the 1960s to the 1980s (photo courtesy BBC One)

BIG SCREEN SUMMER NYFF58 REDUX
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center / Walter Reade Theater
144 / 165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
June 11 – August 26, $10-$15
www.filmlinc.org

One of the joys of fall, and the signal that the summer blockbuster movie blitz is over, is the New York Film Festival. Since 1963, the NYFF has been presenting a wide range of works from around the world, often with postscreening discussions with members of the cast and crew. The 2020 edition was completely virtual because of the pandemic lockdown, so Film at Lincoln Center (FLSC) is bringing much of the festival back with “Big Screen Summer: NYFF58 Redux,” featuring nearly three dozen films now being shown the way they’re supposed to be seen, on large screens at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center and the Walter Reade Theater. Running June 11 to August 26, “NYFF58 Redux” gets under way with two weeks of Steve McQueen’s mammoth five-part epic about West Indian immigrants in London from the 1960s through the 1980s, Small Axe, which was actually made for television; it screens with a newly recorded interview with McQueen, who started as an experimental filmmaker and has made such previous films as Hunger, Twelve Years a Slave, and Shame, and FLSC director of programming Denis Lim.

The multi-award-winning anthology, which premiered on BBC One in the UK and Amazon in the US, begins with Mangrove (June 11-17), the true story of Frank Crichlow (Shaun Parkes) and the Mangrove Nine, Trinidadian immigrants who were harassed mercilessly by Notting Hill police for establishing a peaceful community at Crichlow’s Mangrove café. The second film, one of the best of 2020, is the exhilarating Lovers Rock (June 11-24), a seventy-minute reggae house party in London in 1980, where a group of men and women dance, sing, and fall in love in a cramped space to such songs as Dennis Bovell’s “Silly Games.” (If you’re wondering who the lone old man is, it’s Bovell himself, making a cameo.) But even as Martha (Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn) and Franklyn (Micheal Ward) hit if off, the spectre of racism is not far away. Intimately photographed by Shabier Kirchner, Lovers Rock is an unforgettable experience.

In Red, White and Blue (June 11-17), John Boyega stars as the real-life Leroy Logan, a frustrated West Indian man who joins the London Metropolitan Police department, hoping to change its fundamental racism from the inside, much to the chagrin of his father (Steve Toussaint). Boyega is riveting as Logan discovers that achieving his goal is going to be a lot harder than he ever imagined. Sheyi Cole makes his film debut in the true story Alex Wheatle (June 12-16) as the title character, a teenager caught in England’s discriminatory social services structure and then arrested for participating in the 1981 Brixton uprising, a protest against poor socioeconomic conditions for the African-Caribbean community that included “Bloody Saturday.” The remarkable anthology concludes with Education (June 11-17), an hourlong exploration of institutionalized segregation in the British school system through the eyes of Kingsley (Kenyah Sandy), who is sent to a “special” school where West Indians are purposely kept undereducated, their potentials squashed early in life. A grand achievement by a master filmmaker, Small Axe is no mere historical document of what happened in London decades ago; it is a powerful examination of systemic racism and anti-immigrant biases that is still alive and well in the twenty-first century, especially here in America.

“Big Screen Summer: NYFF58 Redux” continues through August with such other 2020 film festival favorites as Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai, Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk, C. W. Winter’s The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin), Eugène Green’s Atarrabi and Mikelats, Cristi Puiu’s Malmkrog, William Klein’s Muhammad Ali, the Greatest, Raúl Ruiz and Valeria Sarmiento’s The Tango of the Widower and Its Distorting Mirror, Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Wu, and Orson Welles’s Hopper/Welles, an epic conversation between Welles and Dennis Hopper.

CELEBRATING SERGE GAINSBOURG

Jane Birkin, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Rebecca Marder will celebrate the life and legacy of Serge Gainsbourg in live FIAF event

Who: Jane Birkin, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Rebecca Marder, Michael Cooper
What: Virtual talk
Where: FIAF online
When: Thursday, June 10, free with RSVP, 6:30
Why: Thirty years ago this past March, French singer-songwriter, actor, filmmaker, and bon vivant Serge Gainsbourg died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-two, leaving behind a beloved legacy that has only grown since. On June 10 at 6:30, FIAF will host the live online discussion “Celebrating Serge Gainsbourg,” with the engaging model, actress, and singer-songwriter Jane Birkin, his personal and professional partner from 1968 to 1980; their daughter, actress and singer-songwriter Charlotte Gainsbourg; and actress and musician Rebecca Marder, one of six performers in the concert film La Comédie-Française chante Gainsbourg; the event will be moderated by New York Times deputy culture editor Michael Cooper. Admission is free with advance RSVP.

The hourlong film, adapted from Stéphane Varupenne and Sébastien Pouderoux’s Les Serge (Gainsbourg Point Barre), directed by Julien Condemine, and featuring Varupenne, Pouderoux, Marder, Benjamin Lavernhe, Noam Morgensztern, and Yoann Gasiorowski, will be streaming exclusively by FIAF from June 10 to 30; virtual tickets are $15.

UNDINE

Paula Beer stars as the mysterious title character in Christian Petzold’s award-winning Undine (photo by Christian Schulz)

UNDINE (Christian Petzold, 2019)
IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave.
Film at Lincoln Center,
Opens June 4
www.ifccenter.com
www.filmlinc.org

Master German writer-director Christian Petzold (Phoenix, Barbara) gives a unique contemporary twist to a classic European fairy tale in Undine, which opens June 4 at IFC Center and Lincoln Center as well as online. The less you know about the original myth the better, but let’s just say it involves a water nymph, romance, betrayal, and death.

Paula Beer was named Best Actress at the Berlin International Film Festival and at the European Film Awards for her powerful performance as Undine Wibeau, a historian who gives architectural tours of expansive, heavily detailed models of the past, present, and future of Berlin for the Senate Administration for Urban Development. Early on, when her boyfriend, Johannes (Jacob Matschenz), tells her that he is in love with another woman, Nora (Julia Franz Richter), Undine sternly says, “If you leave me, I’ll have to kill you.” There is no reason to doubt her.

Distressed by the situation, she is standing uneasily in a café, looking at an aquarium filled with colorful fish and a small statue of a diver when Christoph (Franz Rogowski), who just attended one of her talks, hesitantly approaches her and offers praise for the lecture. An accident shatters the glass of the aquarium and Undine and Christoph are knocked to the ground, drenched in water. As the fish squirm for life on the floor, Undine and Christoph instantly fall in love. “I’m usually under water,” Christoph, an industrial diver, says to her. German romanticism and French Impressionism mix with magical realism and a revenge thriller as Christoph and Undine run around together, reveling in their love until another accident results in serious trouble.

Undine (Paula Beer) is an architectural historian who is drawn to water in myth-based drama

Among the distinguished writers and composers who have told their own versions of the story of Undine are Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Oscar Wilde, E. T. A. Hoffman, Edgar Allan Poe, Sergei Prokofiev, Hans Christian Andersen, Seamus Heaney, Claude Debussy, and DC Comics. Audrey Hepburn won a Tony for her performance as the title character in Jean Giraudoux’s Ondine on Broadway in 1954. In 2010, Neil Jordan’s Ondine, coincidentally also released on June 4, starred Colin Farrell as a fisherman who catches a woman known as Ondine (Alicja Bachleda) who has a special connection with water.

Water is central to Petzold’s film, from the aquarium to Christoph’s job to Johannes’s pool. Berlin itself was built on a swamp, adding relevance to Undine’s architectural lectures, in which she explains that the name of the city means “dry place in the marsh.” When she is searching for Johannes, she goes into the men’s bathroom and one of the faucets is dripping, the noise echoing down an empty hallway. When Johannes wants to go away with Undine, he tries to lure her by mentioning he’s booked the room they like “overlooking the pond.” Much of the film takes place underwater, with the actors in and out of their scuba gear, beautifully filmed by cameraman Sascha Mieke. (Unfortunately, the giant catfish is animated.) Hans Fromm is the aboveground cinematographer, lushly capturing the streets of Berlin as well as the forest surrounding the lake where Christoph works with Monika (Maryam Zaree) and Jochen (Rafael Stachowiak).

Beer and Rogowski have an intense chemistry that drives the film; they starred together in Petzold’s previous film, Transit, which deals with political refugees, stolen identity, and forbidden love, and are both magnetic here again, whether aboveground or below. The soundtrack’s theme features pianist Vikingur Ólafsson’s gorgeous, haunting rendition of Bach’s Concerto in D Minor, BWV 974 – 2. Adagio. “Everything is there in Johann Sebastian’s music: architectural perfection and profound emotion,” Ólafsson has said, which relates directly to Petzold’s film itself.

SISTERS WITH TRANSISTORS

Daphne Oram is one of the women pioneers of electronic music featured in Sisters with Transistors

SISTERS WITH TRANSISTORS (Lisa Rovner, 2020)
Metrograph Digital
June 3-9
metrograph.com
sisterswithtransistors.com

“This is the story of women who hear music in their heads, of radical sounds where there was once silence, of dreams enabled by technology,” Laurie Anderson says at the beginning of Lisa Rovner’s revelatory Sisters with Transistors, which is back by popular demand for a return engagement on Metrograph Digital. In the film, available June 3-9, Rovner highlights electronic musicians Clara Rockmore, Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Éliane Radigue, Maryanne Amacher, Bebe Barron, Suzanne Ciani, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Spiegel, and Wendy Carlos, trailblazers who deserve more recognition for their ingenuity and their influence on the music of today while blasting through gender stereotypes of the mid-twentieth century and beyond. “Technology is a tremendous liberator,” Spiegel notes. “It blows up power structures.”

In her feature-length debut, writer, director, and coproducer Rovner (Constellations) uses archival footage of Rockmore playing the Theremin with a string quartet in 1934, Derbyshire and Oram explaining how they constructed their unique arrangement of tape reels and computers at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the 1950s and ’60s, Ciani twisting nobs on a wire-laden setup at the Bonino Gallery in New York City in 1974 (and later performing on The David Letterman Show), Radigue talking about how she employed the sounds of airplanes to develop her electronic compositions, Carlos developing her own software and adjusting the synthesizer in her West Side studio, and Barron and her husband using circuit boards to create scores for avant-garde films as well as Forbidden Planet and the Doctor Who theme.

Revolutionary, antiwar, and queer composer Oliveros searches for inner peace through music. Amacher utilizes complex science to make new sounds. Amacher is shown collaborating with Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth. “She wanted to develop an extremely rigorous approach to listening, to activating sites, to thinking outside of the composition as it’s known,” composer Nadia Botello says about Amacher. “She didn’t want to push around dead white men’s notes.”

Rovner speaks with several of the artists in addition to such musicians as Rhys Chatham, Kim Gordon, Morton Subotnick, Holly Herndon, Charles Amirkhanian, Jean-Michel Jarre, and others who sing the praises of these pioneers. The Metrograph website takes a deep dive into the history of these women with a Q&A with Rovner; the essay “Sounding Out Electronic Music’s Female Pioneers” by Margaret Barton-Fumo; an interview with Anderson; a “Sound of Liberation” panel with Rovner, Spiegel, Ciani, Arushi Jain, Moor Mother, Gavilán Rayna Russom, and Madame Gandhi, moderated by Geeta Dayal; and a conversation about women in tech with Emmy Parker, LaFrae Sci, Suzi Analogue, Stephi Duckula, and moderator Alissa DeRubeis. In the end, it is the women composers themselves who best sum it all up.

“Technology is a natural extension of man; man has always played with tools. Man has always developed tools,” Carlos says in an old interview. “The machine doesn’t write the music; you tell the machine what to do. The machine is an extension of you.” And Spiegel, shown feeding pigeons on Staple St. in 2018, elucidates, “We were, in a way, trying to make a bit of a revolution, but I don’t think we would have put it in such grandiose terms. We were trying to put music back in touch with itself.”

MAYA LIN: GHOST FOREST

Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest will decompose in Madison Square Park through mid-November (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Madison Square Park Oval Lawn
Exhibition continues through November 14
madisonsquarepark.org
whatismissing.net

Postponed for a year because of the pandemic, Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest is up and dying a slow death in Madison Square Park. The exhibition shines a light on climate change, logging practices, environmental degradation, extreme deprivation, and other human interventions that are destroying the natural world. Ghost Forest consists of forty-nine forty-foot-tall Atlantic white cedars from the Pine Barrens in New Jersey. The bare trees, around eighty years old, are not technically dead yet, but they will wither away through November 14 as the grass and trees of the park turn green around them over the summer before fading as fall heads into winter. “Throughout the world, climate change is causing vast tracts of forested lands to die off,” Lin says in her artist’s statement. “They are being called ghost forests; they are being killed off by rising temperatures, extreme weather events that yield saltwater intrusion, forest fires, and insects whose populations are thriving in these warmer temperatures, and trees that are more susceptible to beetles due to being overstressed from these rising temperatures. In southwestern Colorado where my family and I live in the summer, these forests — killed off by beetles — are all around us. As I approached thinking about a sculptural installation for Madison Square Park, I knew I wanted to create something that would be intimately related to the park itself, the trees, and the state of the earth.”

The “gentle giants,” as Lin calls them, form a kind of twisting maze that visitors can walk through (except in the rain.) The bare trunks and branches evoke griefs large and small: It’s hard not to think of the isolation and loss of the past fourteen months of the Covid-19 crisis; in addition, Lin’s husband, photography collector and dealer Daniel Wolf, died of a heart attack in January at the age of sixty-five. The display was supposed to consist of fifty trees, but one didn’t survive the transport, another fatality. Lin is most well known for her Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC; other earthworks and environmental installations by Lin include The Secret Life of Grasses at Storm King, Map of Memory: Hudson River Timeline at the Hudson River Museum, Seven Earth Mountain at Pier 94, A History of Water at the Orlando Museum of Art, and the 2011 short film Unchopping a Tree, which asks, “If deforestation were happening in your city, how quickly would you work to stop it?”

Forty-nine bare trees rise like doomed skyscrapers in Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Ghost Forest is part of Lin’s “What Is Missing?” project, an online global memorial where people can share memories of something from the natural world that has disappeared or is diminishing or discuss specific examples of ecological conservation and restoration. Be sure to listen to Ghost Forest Soundscape, thirteen minutes of sounds made by the gray fox, cougar, barred owl, American black bear, elk, harbor seal, bat, beaver, bottle nose dolphin, and wild turkey, a powerful reminder of living beings that once could be heard and seen in and around New York; in conjunction with Ghost Forest, there will also be a series of in-person and online talks. “We will be coordinating public programs that focus on nature-based solutions to climate change as well as highlighting the ecological history of Manhattan through a soundscape of species that were once common in the city,” Lin explains. “We are faced with an enormous ecological crisis — but I also feel that we have a chance to showcase what can be done to help protect species and significantly reduce the climate change emissions by changing our relationship to the land itself.” To counteract the project’s carbon footprint, Lin, the Natural Areas Conservancy, and the Madison Square Park Conservancy will be planting more than one thousand trees and shrubs across all five boroughs.

From June 1 to 11, the public is invited to answer the question “How has climate change altered your daily life?”; the responses will be posted on a reflection board at the north corner of the Oval Lawn as well as on social media. On June 4 at 9:00 am (free with advance RSVP), the park will host, on Zoom, its sixth annual public art symposium, “Greening Public Art,” highlighted by a keynote conversation with Lin, Rodale Institute board member Maria Rodale, Nature Conservancy in New York executive director Bill Ulfelder, and Perfect Earth Project founder Edwina von Gal, moderated by Andrew Revkin of the Earth Institute at Columbia. Other speakers include Una Chaudhuri, Marina Zurkow, Anita Fields, Nicholas Galanin, Allison Janae Hamilton, Tavares Strachan, and Lucia Pietroiusti and moderator Sarah Douglas. On June 15 at 6:00, the park and Fotografiska New York team up for an art talk with Gabriella Demczuk, who documents ghost forests across the United States; advance registration is required. On September 21 at 6:00 Fotografiska will host an art talk with Lin and Elizabeth Kolbert as part of Climate Week NYC, followed October 19 at 6:00 with Lin and von Gal discussing climate change with moderator Sarah Charlop-Powers. And on November 9 at 6:00, Fotografiska will livestream David Scott Kessler’s experimental film The Pine Barrens, with a live score by the Ruins of Friendship Orchestra. If only the world would listen.

In addition, Music on the Green is a series of live concerts with Carnegie Hall held on Wednesday nights within Ghost Forest; below is the full lineup:

Wednesday, July 7, 6:00
Music by Barber, Bartók, Copland, Caroline Shaw, others
Cort Roberts, horn
Adelya Nartadjieva, violin
Gergana Haralampieva, violin
Halam Kim, viola
Madeline Fayette, cello

Wednesday, July 14, 6:00
Music by Messiaen, Copland, Kaija Saariaho, Reena Esmail, others
Leo Sussman, flute
Wilden Dannenberg, horn
Jennifer Liu, violin
Halam Kim, viola
Madeline Fayette, cello

Wednesday, July 21, 6:00
Bach’s Goldberg Variations, India Gailey’s Mountainweeps, John Luther Adams’s Three High Places, others
Halam Kim, viola
TBD, violin
Arlen Hlusko, cello

Wednesday, July 28, 6:00
Andrea Casarrubios’s Speechless, Leven Zuelke’s At a Cemetery, and works by Ravel, Fauré, Debussy, and Ellington
Sae Hashimoto, percussion
Suliman Tekalli, violin
Ari Evan, cello

Wednesday, August 4, 6:00
Satie’s Gnossiennes, John Psathas’s Fragment, and works by Duke Ellington and Chick Corea
Ian Sullivan, vibraphone
Sae Hashimoto, marimba

Wednesday, August 11, 6:00
Hans Abrahamsen’s wind quintet Walden, Hannah Lash’s Leander and Hero, and works by Beach, Piazzolla, Still, others
Amir Farsi, flute
Stuart Breczinski, oboe
Yasmina Spiegelberg, clarinet
Nik Hooks, bassoon
Cort Roberts, horn