Philippe Petit will look back at his historic walk between the Twin Towers at special events at St. John the Divine (photo courtesy Man on Wire)
Who:Philippe Petit, Sting, Anat Cohen, Molly Lewis, Sophie Auster, Tim Guinee, Lorenzo Pisoni, Evelyne Crochet, Shawn Conley, James Marsh, Michael Miles, and students of Ballet Tech What: Live performances celebrating fiftieth anniversary of Twin Towers high-wire walk Where:The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, 1047 Amsterdam Ave. at 112th St. When: Wednesday, August 7, and Thursday, August 8, $50-$500 (VIP $1800), 8:30 Why: It was an unforgettable moment in my childhood. On August 7, 1974, French tightrope artist Philippe Petit, six days shy of his twenty-fifth birthday, pulled off what he called “le coup”: After six years of secret planning, he snuck up to the top of the South Tower of the recently built World Trade Center and walked on a 131-foot-long wire he had strung to the other, 1,350 feet aboveground, traversing it eight times over forty-five minutes using a balancing pole. The crossing was completely unauthorized; spectators and security officers alike were stunned. It was a spectacular achievement that went viral well before there was anything like social media. It was all over the news, on television and in the papers, and it was all anyone was talking about.
“This is probably the end of my life to step on that wire,” Petit says in James Marsh’s 2008 documentary, Man on Wire. “Death is very close.”
The Twin Towers opened on April 4, 1973, and were destroyed on September 11, 2001.
Petit has also walked the high wire at the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Louisiana Superdome, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Paris Opera, the Museum of the City of New York, the Eiffel Tower, and locations in Jerusalem, Tokyo, Vienna, Frankfurt, Belgium, Switzerland, and numerous US cities. In 1982, 1992, and 1996, he performed the feat at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, where he has been an artist in residence for more than four decades.
On August 7 and 8, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of his World Trade Center walk, called the “artistic crime of the century,” Petit has conceived and directed “Towering!!,” a special two-night multidisciplinary happening consisting of nineteen scenes at the cathedral, where he will be joined by clarinetist Anat Cohen, musical whistler Molly Lewis, singer-songwriter Sophie Auster, actors Tim Guinee and Lorenzo Pisoni, classical pianist Evelyne Crochet, bassist and composer Shawn Conley, musician, author, and educator Michael Miles, and students from Ballet Tech dance school.
Petit, who turns seventy-five on August 13, will walk the high wire and share stories about his WTC adventure. In addition, his good friend Sting will play three songs, including “Let the Great World Spin,” which was written specifically for this event, and Marsh will debut a short film about Petit.
Limited tickets are still available for several sections as well as VIP seating, which comes with Champagne and dessert with Petit after the performance. Part of the proceeds support programs at the cathedral and the preservation of Petit’s archives.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
CatVideoFest 2024
IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Nitehawk Cinema, 188 Prospect Park West
Saturday, August 3, and Sunday, August 4, 11:00 am
(Nitehawk bonus screenings August 10-11) www.ifccenter.com nitehawkcinema.com www.catvideofest.com
“There have likely never been so many cats living on the streets of New York,” New York magazine declared in July. There have likely also never been so many cat videos living on the internet.
During times of strife, especially amid the tumult of social media, many of us seek solace in cat videos. There’s just something about the tricky little devils riding Roombas, squeezing into ridiculously tight spaces, sneaking up on us like ninjas, and jumping and climbing everywhere that soothes our souls. “There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats,” polymath Albert Schweitzer said.
Cat fanciers can find refuge from the maelstrom at Oscilloscope Laboratories’ “CatVideoFest 2024,” screening August 3 and 4 at IFC Center and Nitehawk Cinema. The final selection of videos were chosen from more than fifteen thousand short films, divided into such sections as drama, music, animation, and action-adventure. “Everything that you’d possibly want to see a cat do you will see a cat do,” IFC general manager Harris Dew told WPIX earlier this week.
A portion of the proceeds from IFC ticket sales will go to Animal Haven, which has been rescuing cats and dogs and finding them forever homes since 1967; the Nitehawk screenings, which continue August 10 and 11, benefit Sean Casey Animal Shelter, which specializes in the most difficult medical cases.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer, editor, and cat lover; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Takashi Murakami adds unique characters to many of his Hiroshige re-creations in Brooklyn Museum exhibit (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
SOL/SOLEY/SOLO
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, August 3, free, 5:00 – 10:00
212-864-5400 www.brooklynmuseum.org
The Brooklyn Museum honors Caribbean culture with its free August First Saturday program, “Sol/Soley/Solo,” featuring live performances by Metro Steel Orchestra, RAGGA NYC DJs Oscar Nñ and Byrell the Great, Dada Cozmic, and Lulada Club; storytelling with Janet Morrison and Deborah C. Mortimer; a pop-up Caribbean market; pop-up poetry with Roberto Carlos Garcia, Omotara James, Anesia Alfred, and Christina Olivares; a hands-on art workshop in which participants will make Caribbean-inspired fans; and screenings of Ben DiGiacomo and Dutty Vannier’s 2023 documentary Bad Like Brooklyn Dancehall, followed by a talkback with Pat McKay, Screechy Dan, and Red Fox, moderated by Lauren Zelaya, and Eché Janga’s 2020 drama, Buladó. In addition, the galleries will be open late so you can check out “Nico Williams: Aaniin, I See Your Light,”“Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm,” “Brooklyn Abstraction: Four Artists, Four Walls,” “The Brooklyn Della Robbia,” “The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago,” and more.
Paul McCartney, Self-portrait, London, 1963, large graphic reproduction (courtesy MPL Communications Ltd.)
It’s also your last chance to catch the must-see exhibition “Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo (feat. Takashi Murakami),” which closes August 4. For the first time in more than two decades, the Brooklyn Museum is displaying its rare complete set of Utagawa Hiroshige’s “100 Famous Views of Edo,” an 1856–58 collection of woodblock prints of Edo, later to become Tokyo. Hiroshige, who died in 1858 at the age of sixty-one, captured everyday life in the gorgeous works, from flora and fauna to stunning landscapes to fish, cats, people, and weather patterns, including Nihonbashi, Clearing After Snow; Ryogoku Ekoin and Moto-Yanagibashi Bridge; Cotton-Goods Lane, Odenma-cho; Yatsukoji, Inside Sujikai Gate; Shitaya Hirokoji; Night View of the Matsuchiyama and Sam’ya Canal; View of Nihonbashi Tori-itchome; Sudden Shower over Shin-Ohashi Bridge and Atake; and Bamboo Yards, Kyobashi Bridge.
Modernism, Inc. subject Eliot Noyes is hard at work in his New Canaan office (courtesy of the Pedro Guerrero Estate)
MODERNISM, INC. (Jason Cohn, 2023)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, July 19
212-924-7771 www.ifccenter.com
“Good design is good business” was the mantra employed by architect Eliot Noyes, who, with IBM CEO Tom Watson Jr., helped rebrand the company through its public image from top to bottom, from its logo to the look of its products, creating a legacy that is still in evidence today.
Noyes’s career is detailed in Jason Cohn’s documentary Modernism, Inc., opening July 19 at IFC Center, with Cohn on hand for Q&As on Friday and Saturday night at the 6:50 screening.
The eighty-minute film skips over Noyes’s childhood, beginning with his disgruntlement with the old-fashioned ideas taught at Harvard in the 1930s. In 1937, he started studying with German American architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and never looked back. Noyes wanted to incorporate the reality of modern life, including social and economic problems, into his work. “Gropius pushed Noyes to see the continuity between art, architecture, and the design of everyday objects, what Gropius called the total theory of design,” narrator and French actor Sebastian Roché explains.
In 1939, Noyes, who was born in Boston in 1910, was hired as the first director of industrial design at the Museum of Modern Art, where he staged the important 1941 exhibition “Organic Design in Home Furnishings.” He enlisted in the Army Air Force during WWII, exploring the efficacy of using gliders in battle. He espoused his theory of design on the television program Omnibus. From 1947 to 1960, he wrote an influential column for Consumer Reports called “The Shape of Things.”
In 1956, one of his colleagues on the Pentagon’s glider project, Watson, brought him over to IBM to remake its corporate culture; Noyes refused to become a full-time employee, instead accepting the position of consultant director of design, working from his home in New Canaan, Connecticut, where he and his wife, Molly Weed, who contributed to many of his designs, raised four children: Eli, Fred, Meridee, and Derry. New Canaan became a hub for designers, as Marcel Breuer, Philip Johnson, Joe Johansen, and others soon moved into the exclusive suburb.
Eliot Noyes was IBM’s consultant director of design from 1954 to 1977 (courtesy of the Eliot Noyes Family)
“Eliot Noyes had quite a curious view of Modernism, a deep-seated belief that design could be at the core of building a future society,” design historian Alice Twemlow says in the film. Noyes’s designs, from the conversation chair, IBM Selectric, and large computers to logos for such companies as IBM, Mobil, Westinghouse, Pan Am, and Xerox to his unique houses, felt as new as free jazz and abstract expressionism, interweaving form and function. He collaborated with such industry luminaries as Charles Eames and Paul Rand, known as “Matisse on Madison Ave.” Not everything was successful; one notable failure was his bubble house.
Describing what went into constructing a house for her family in 1978, Lyn Chivvis, interviewed in her Noyes-designed kitchen with her husband, Arthur, tells Cohn, “El was able to talk to his clients, my parents and us, and find out, what do you need for your daily life? El developed the open-shelving idea. He actually measured the shelves for me. It doesn’t fit you. It doesn’t fit you, it doesn’t fit anyone else but me.”
Cohn also speaks with IBM design head Katrina Alcorn, Noyes biographer Gordon Bruce, IBM chief archivist Jamie Martin, University of Toronto architecture professor and historian John Harwood, IBM design manager Tom Hardy, design historian Thomas Hine, and Noyes’s children, integrating archival footage, home movies, industrial films, and old advertisements (the film was edited by Kevin Jones), accompanied by a sensitive score by Steven Emerson/Ever Studio.
Noyes’s career trajectory took a turn at the 1970 International Design Conference Aspen, which he headed, when the theme of design fusing with the environment was seized upon by counterculture activists to protest against corporate greed, the Vietnam War, and the misuse of natural resources by design firms. The conference was filmed by his son Eli and director Claudia Weil, who captured intense moments. “I’m not a political guy. I’m interested in making my points through my work,” the elder Noyes tells Oscar-winning graphic designer Saul Bass. (Eli, who died this past March at the age of eighty-one, had been nominated for an Oscar for his 1964 claymation short Clay or the Origin of Species.)
“The designers who were at Aspen, their consciousness was good design can change things. I think Eliot Noyes would profess this,” Chip Lord, the cofounder of the alternative architecture collective Ant Farm and a conference attendee, explains. “Good design makes a good product or a good branding. It is a form of change. But our critique was beyond that because it didn’t matter how well you designed a gigantic SUV if it’s just guzzling fuel.”
The conference changed Noyes; he resigned from the IDCA and spent more time with his family. His children note that they really didn’t get to know their father until his later years, including a particularly memorable trip together.
Noyes died in 1977 at the age of sixty-six; he may not be a household name, but his impact on the visual and architectural history of twentieth-century American culture is still unmistakable in corporations and households around the world.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
The High Line will host special programming at West Side Fest (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
WEST SIDE FEST
July 12-14, free
Multiple locations between Bank & West Thirtieth Sts. www.westsidefest.nyc
Every June, the Upper East Side hosts the Museum Mile Festival, when seven or eight arts institutions, including the Met, the Guggenheim, the Cooper Hewitt, the Jewish Museum, and El Museo del Barrio, open its doors for free and turn Fifth Ave. into an arts-based street fair.
The West Side is getting in on the action with its own celebration with the weekend-long West Side Fest, running July 12-14, featuring live performances, guided tours, open studios, interactive workshops, special presentations, and free entry at many locations between Bank and Thirtieth Sts., including the Rubin, Poster House, the Whitney, Hudson Guild, Little Island, the Shed, Dia Chelsea, and the Joyce. Below is the full schedule; a map is available at the above website.
Friday, July 12
NYC Aids Memorial, 7:00 am – 11:00 pm
The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center, 8:00 am – 10:00 pm
Hudson Guild: Déflorée History Series, with panels by Valerie Hallier, 10:00 am – 5:00 pm
Hudson Guild: Triennial Children’s Art Show, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
Poster House, free admission, 10:00 – 6:00
Little Island: Creative Break, art workshops, 11:00 am – 1:00 pm
Dia Chelsea, noon – 6:00
Whitney Museum of American Art: Open Studio for Teens, 1:00 – 3:00
IndieSpace/West Village Rehearsal Co-Op: Open Rehearsal by Divine Riot Company of Five Times in One Night, 2:00 – 5:00
Hill Art Foundation: Sound Bath, with musician Daren Ho, 5:00 – 7:00
The Joyce Theater at Chelsea Green Park: Pop-Up Dance Performances by Pilobolus and Dorrance Dance, 5:00 & 6:30
The Shed: Summer Sway, 5:00 – 8:00
White Columns: Exhibition Opening Reception, with works by Michaela Bathrick, Ali Bonfils, Joseph Brock, Eleanor Conover, and Donyel Ivy-Royal, 5:00 – 8:00
Whitney Museum of American Art: Free Friday Nights, advance RSVP required, 5:00 – 10:00
Print Center New York: Print Center After Hours, 6:00 – 8:00
Westbeth Artists Housing x the Kitchen Kickoff Celebration & Poster Sale, 6:00 – 8:00
Rubin Museum of Art: K2 Friday Night, 6:00 – 10:00
Little Island: Teen Night, 7:00 – 8:00
“Wonder City of the World: New York City Travel Posters” is on view at Poster House
Saturday, July 13
High Line: Family Art Moment: Dream Wilder with Us, ages 5–12, 10:00 am – noon
IndieSpace/West Village Rehearsal Co-Op: Open Rehearsal by Divine Riot Company of Five Times in One Night, 10:00 am – 1:00 pm
Poster House, free admission, 10:00 – 6:00
Hudson River Park: Explore & Play, 14th Street Park, 11:00 am – 1:00 pm
Little Island: Creative Break, 11:00 am – 1:00 pm
Westbeth Artists Housing: Penny’s Puppets, 11:00 am – 1:00 pm
Rubin Museum of Art, 11:00 am – 5:00 pm
Center for Art, Research, and Alliances, Javier Téllez: Amerika, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
High Line: A Celebration of High Line Wellness, 11:30 am – 1:00 pm
The Kitchen: Tai Chi Workshop, 11:30 am – 1:00 pm
Hudson Guild: Triennial Children’s Art Show, noon – 3:00
Poster House Block Party, noon – 5:00
Dia Chelsea, noon – 6:00
Hudson Guild: Déflorée History Series, with panels by Valerie Hallier, 1:00 – 4:00
The Kitchen Poster Sale, 1:00 – 6:00
Westbeth Artists Housing: Art & Craft Market, 1:00 – 6:00
IndieSpace/West Village Rehearsal Co-Op: Open Rehearsal by Ali Keller, 2:00 – 5:00
Print Center New York: Print Activation with Demian DinéYazhi’, 2:00 – 5:00
Westbeth Artists Housing Open Studios, 2:00 – 5:00
Dia Chelsea Soil Sessions: Earth Sounds with Koyoltzintli, advance RSVP required, 2:30
Westbeth Artists Housing: You Are Never Too Old to Play, 7:00 – 9:00
The Rubin reimagines its collection in grand finale (photo byt twi-ny/mdr)
Sunday, July 14
The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center, 8:00 am – 8:00 pm
Poster House, free admission, 10:00 – 6:00
Whitney Museum of American Art: Free Second Sundays, 10:30 am – 6:00 pm
Hudson River Park Community Celebration, with Ajna Dance Company, henna, and community groups, Pier 63, 11:00 am – 1:00 pm
Center for Art, Research, and Alliances, Javier Téllez: Amerika, 11:00 am – 6:00 pm
Rubin Museum of Art: Family Sunday, 1:00 – 3:00
Westbeth Artists Housing Open Studios and Art & Craft Market, 1:00 – 5:00
Westbeth Artists Housing: Art Take-Over, curated by Valérie Hallier, Claire Felonis, and Noah Trapolino, 1:00 – 6:00
Whitney Museum of American Art: STAFF ONLY, Westbeth Gallery, 1:00 – 6:00
Chelsea Factory: Ladies of Hip-Hop’s Ladies Battle!, 1:00 – 10:00
IndieSpace/West Village Rehearsal Co-Op: Open Rehearsal by Felice Lesser Dance Theater of I AM A DANCER 2.0, 2:00 – 4:00
High Line: The Death Avenue Posse, by the Motor Company, 5:30 & 7:00
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Everyone becomes obsessed with the title character in Gen Nagao’s strange and unusual The Box Man
JAPAN CUTS: FESTIVAL OF NEW JAPANESE FILM
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
July 10-21, $10-$25
212-715-1258 www.japansociety.org
“I never would have expected to be praised for my tentative steps as an actor at Japan Cuts, a film festival in New York!” eighty-two-year-old Chinese-born Japanese actor Tatsuya Fuji said about winning the Lifetime Achievement Award at this year’s fest at Japan Society. “The last time I visited New York was nearly half a century ago. Back then, Nagisa Oshima’s film, In the Realm of the Senses, was invited to the New York Film Festival, but unfortunately, it couldn’t be screened due to censorship. And now, in 2024, the film I participated in, Great Absence, is being screened in New York, and they’ve even given me an award! I am overwhelmed with emotion!”
It would be a shame for movie lovers to be absent at the seventeenth annual festival, which runs July 10-21 and celebrates new Japanese film with more than thirty features, documentaries, animation, shorts, and a few classics. The opening-night selection is Masanori Tominaga’s Between the White Key and the Black Key, which takes place over the course of one night in the life of jazz pianist Hiroshi Minami. The centerpiece is Shadow of Fire, which concludes Shinya Tsukamoto’s war trilogy that began with Fires on the Plain and Killing and stars Cut Above honoree Mirai Moriyama. The festival comes to an end with the international premiere of Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi’s Shin Godzilla: ORTHOchromatic, a revised version of the 2016 original.
In between there are family-friendly works, romance stories, manga-based cartoons, searches for the meaning of existence, and a samurai tale from Takeshi Kitano. As is my preference every July, I’ve checked out two of the most unorthodox films, a pair that are unexpectedly similar in their use of black-and-white, dialogue, sex, violence, music, small casts, and investigations of loneliness.
A man (Daiki Hiba) and woman (Misa Wada) fear danger ahead in Gen Nagao’s Motion Picture: Choke
MOTION PICTURE: CHOKE (『映画 (窒息)』/ EIGA CHISSOKU) (Gen Nagao, 2023)
Friday, July 12, 9:00 japansociety.org
Nary a word is spoken in Gen Nagao’s black-and-white Motion Picture: Choke, which is set in a dystopian past/future that is either pre- or postverbal as it explores the inflexibility of the human condition in an unidentifiable time or place. The film begins in total darkness with Kiyoyuki Yoshikawa’s pulsating score, evoking the music of Bernard Herrmann in Alfred Hitchcock thrillers, followed by a frightening figure in black crawling up a woman’s body. The terrified woman (Misa Wada) awakes from the dream, panting, but then goes about her daily chores. Dressed in ragged, primitive clothing reminiscent of what Raquel Welch wore in One Million Years B.C., she scavenges for food, washes herself in a stream, collects water, and weaves by candlelight.
Living in an abandoned three-level concrete building with no outside walls or doors, she seems to enjoy her life. Every so often, a sweet-natured elderly peddler (Minori Terada) stops by to barter by playing a game. Everything is pleasant until a white-robed man (Takashi Nishina) and his two underlings (Yuri Tajima and Hiroshi Niki) brutally attack the woman, leaving her devastated and angry. She constructs a trap for protection that captures a shirtless young man (Daiki Hiba), who she ties to a wall like Jesus on a cross. They ultimately start a charming partnership, learning together how to survive this empty world, but when the evil bandits return, male toxicity rises up as a battle for power ensues — with the woman determined to not play the victim again.
In only his second full-length film, following 2019’s Someday in Love, Nagao is in complete command as he explores multiple genres; perhaps Motion Picture is part of the title to remind the viewer that this is about the cinematic experience as much as it is a history of how women have been treated by men since the beginning of time. Wada (Cape’s Brothers and Sisters,Kiku to Guillotine) is captivating as the woman, who is not about to get taken advantage of twice. She has an understanding of life that the men will never have, especially when she seeks revenge.
The lack of dialogue is no mere gimmick; instead, it harkens to how humans communicate with one another in the most basic of ways in any era, without language, like animals. The film is gorgeously photographed by Sota Takahashi, with stark lighting by Kohei Kajimoto; Yoshikawa’s music shifts genres as well, from ominous and threatening to innocent and playful.
From its opening moments to its startling, accusatory finale, Choke is precisely the kind of film that makes Japan Cuts one of the best festivals of the year.
A nurse (Koichi Sato) contemplates her future in Gakuryu Ishii’s strange and unusual The Box Man
THE BOX MAN (『箱 男 / HAKO OTOKO) (Gakuryu Ishii, 2024)
Saturday, July 13, 5:30 japansociety.org
“Those who obsess over the box man become the box man,” a man in a shabby box whispers early in Gakuryu Ishii’s creepy, bizarre adaptation of Kōbō Abe 1973 novel, The Box Man.
I can now firmly declare that I am obsessed with the box man. But aren’t we all?
The film takes place just as the prosperity of Japan’s Shōwa period is ending in 1973. The first few minutes are in black-and-white, featuring Abe’s street photography, before we meet the box man, aka Myself (Masatoshi Nagase), who declares in voice-over:
“I see right through everything. A fabricated box you put your faith in. It is you people who live inside it. I have abandoned all that is fake, to obtain the real thing. What is more, I can see. You people as you truly are. The hidden shape of this world. Together with this box, the world shall be completely reborn. I am the box man. I gaze at you unilaterally.”
As it turns to color, he continues, “I become identifiable. You may see me, but you pay no attention. You feign ignorance. And yet, just as I once did, if you become overly aware of the box man . . .”
The box man lives in a cardboard box that reaches down to his knees; it is from the Argon company, makers of medical supplies. There’s a rectangular slit on one side so he can see in front of him; the horizontal space resembles a letterboxed film, except in this case it works both ways, from the inside and the outside. He watches us as we watch him.
He moves stealthily through the streets, avoiding unnecessary contact, until he’s being tracked by a photographer with a rifle and threatened by a slingshot-wielding ex-military madman. But soon he finds himself in a small, private hospital run by an older gentleman called the General (Ayana Shiramoto), his assistant, a doctor (Tadanobu Asano), and their nurse (Koichi Sato), where an odd power dynamic unfolds involving self-identity, sex, control over one’s body and mind, who gets to tell their story, and reality itself.
Ishii’s film has been thirty years in the making, when he received Abe’s blessing to go forward with it. The book has previously been adapted into two short films, but this is the first full-length version, with screenwriters Kiyotaka Inagaki and Ishii (Crazy Thunder Road,Punksamurai Slash Down) making significant changes while staying true to Abe’s original vision.
Hideho Urata’s photography gives the film an immersive quality, as if we are all in our own box, which is sort of true whether we’re experiencing it at home on a TV or streaming device or in a theater. When the doctor is questioned by a detective (Yûko Nakamura) in a police interview room, another cop peers through a long slit in a wall, making him another kind of box man. Michiaki Katsumoto’s wide-ranging score guides us through 1940s detective noir, 1960s jangly pop, 1970s thriller, and a hilarious psychedelic scene with an enema.
The Box Man doesn’t always make sense; some plot twists are hard to decipher, and it is too long at two hours, but you won’t be able to look away for even a second. You’ll also wonder what life inside a box could be like, if you’re not already in one, psychologically or physically.
Like Motion Picture: Choke,The Box Man deals with loneliness, sex, violence, love, faith, misogyny, homelessness, and a dark future in which humanity builds cages for themselves and others, as well as how we tell stories — and who gets to tell them. At one point, the box man sees words appear on a wall, expressing, “Within this labyrinth, I shall seek an exit.” But getting out is not going to be easy, for any of us.
The Box Man is screening July 13 at 5:30 at Japan Society, with Ishii on hand for a Q&A. He will also participate in a Q&A following the July 14 showing of his 1995 rite-of-passage drama, August in the Water.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Be prepared to get swept away by summer film festival at Metrograph
SUMMER AT SEA
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
July 5 – September 2
212-660-0312 metrograph.com/film
It’s easy to get swept away by Metrograph’s “Summer at Sea,” a two-month festival of nineteen films set at the beach, on the ocean, and poolside. Among the wide-ranging works being shown are Agnès Varda’s La Pointe Courte, Christian Petzold’s Afire, Federico Fellini’s And the Ship Sails On, Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois’s Lilo & Stitch, Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice, Jacques Deray’s La Piscine, and Lina Wertmüller’s Swept Away . . . by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August. Below is a closer look at several of the movies.
In addition, on July 20, Metrograph will be hosting its annual Summer Book Fair, this year honoring the late dance critic, literary editor, and publisher Robert Gottlieb, who passed away in June 2023 at the age of ninety-two. Gottlieb worked with such authors and celebrities as John Cheever, Doris Lessing, Chaim Potok, Salman Rushdie, John le Carré, Ray Bradbury, Michael Crichton, Toni Morrison, Bill Clinton, Nora Ephron, Katharine Hepburn, Lauren Bacall, Liv Ullmann, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, and, most famously, Robert Caro; his longtime collaboration with Caro was documented in the terrific 2022 film Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb. The fair will feature more than five hundred film books owned by Gottlieb, which will be availabie for sale, each one stamped with a seal certifying “From the Library of Robert Gottlieb.”
Father (David Niven) and daughter (Jean Seberg) have a little talk in lush Otto Preminger melodrama
BONJOUR TRISTESSE (Otto Preminger, 1958)
Metrograph
Friday July 5, 4:45
Sunday July 7, 12:20
Sunday July 14, 7:30 metrograph.com/film
Douglas Sirk would surely be proud of Otto Preminger’s wickedly obsessive 1958 melodrama, Bonjour Tristesse. Based on the 1954 novel by eighteen-year-old author Françoise Sagan, the film, whose titles translates as “Hello, Sadness,” stars Jean Seberg as Cécile, a seventeen-year-old girl on the cusp of womanhood, a child-adult living the good life while beginning to enjoy the pleasures of drinking, smoking, and sexual desire. She and her wealthy father, Raymond (a dapper David Niven), have moved into a posh villa on the French Riviera for the summer, where the widowed Raymond attempts to balance his time with serious fashion queen Anne Larsen (Deborah Kerr) and flighty young blonde Elsa (Mylène Demongeot). A selfish cad who considers only himself, Raymond is soon in deep water when the two women find out about each other. Meanwhile, Cécile tosses aside her studies in order to flirt with twenty-five-year-old neighbor Philippe (Geoffrey Horne) and other older men who quickly fall in love with her relatively carefree lifestyle, one that seemingly can only end in trouble.
Written by Arthur Laurents (Anastasia, The Way We Were), beautifully photographed in color (in Saint-Tropez) and black-and-white (in Paris) by Georges Périnal (Rembrandt, The Fallen Idol), and featuring costumes by Givenchy and jewelry by Cartier, Bonjour Tristesse examines love, lust, power, style, and jealousy, directed with an iron fist by Preminger, who often yelled at and embarrassed Seberg on-set in order to influence her performance. But at the heart of the film is the risqué relationship between Raymond and Cécile, one that more than hints at incest.
Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) and Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) are on the run in Wes Anderson’s delightful Moonrise Kingdom
MOONRISE KINGDOM (Wes Anderson, 2012)
Friday July 5, 5:00
Saturday July 6, 2:45
Wednesday July 10, 3:30 metrograph.com/film
In such unique films as Rushmore,The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Darjeeling Limited, black-comedy master Wes Anderson has created a bizarre collection of characters who seem to live in their own alternate realities. In Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson has once again assembled an oddball assortment of men, women, and children in a terrifically clever and entertaining fairy tale all its own. Tired of being abused by his fellow Khaki Scouts and dismissed by his foster parents, twelve-year-old orphan Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) runs away from Camp Ivanhoe on the island of New Penzance, much to the chagrin of dedicated scout master Randy Ward (Edward Norton). Meanwhile, twelve-year-old loner Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) is fed up with her life as well, which she mostly spends listening to Benjamin Britten, reading fairy tales (fictitious stories made up by Anderson), watching the world through a pair of ever-present binoculars, and despising her parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand). Afraid of what might have happened to the children, the local police officer, Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis), gets involved, as does a stern woman from social services (Tilda Swinton) and, eventually, a very different kind of scout, Cousin Ben (Jason Schwartzman).
The proceedings are overseen by a narrator (Bob Balaban) who ends up being more than just an omniscient presence. Moonrise Kingdom is an absolute gem of a film, an exciting, original tale about growing up told in a fabulously funny deadpan manner that combines slapstick humor with wildly ironic elements, filled with the endless wonders of childhood, although it is most definitely not for children. Newcomers Gilman and Hayward appear wise beyond their years in the lead roles, with outstanding support from an all-star cast, most prominently Norton as the by-the-book scout master on a mission. Written by Anderson with Roman Coppola, the film also features a lovely score by Alexandre Desplat.
Harry (Lars Ekborg) and Monika (Harriet Andersson) run away to start a new life in Summer with Monika
SUMMER WITH MONIKA (SOMMAREN MED MONIKA) (Ingmar Bergman, 1953)
Metrograph
Friday July 5, 7:10
Saturday July 6, 5:00
Thursday July 11, 4:15 metrograph.com/film
Swedish director Ingmar Bergman shocked the film world in 1953 with the controversial Summer with Monika, the tale of two young lovers who run away from their families and go on a brief but intense sexual adventure. The film featured full-frontal nudity by Harriet Andersson, with whom Bergman had a short relationship; the movie was actually edited down by distributor Kroger Babb to focus on the sex and nudity, renaming it Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl! and marketing it to US audiences as an exploitation picture. But Film Forum is screening the superb original version as part of its five-week centennial celebration of Bergman’s birth. Based on the 1951 novel by Per Anders Fogelström, Summer with Monika takes place in a working-class area of Stockholm, where Harry (Lars Ekborg) and Monika (Harriet Andersson) toil away in a glassware factory. Harry lives with his ailing father (Georg Skarstedt), while Monika sleeps in her family’s kitchen. Both teens are bored with their already dull and unfulfilling lives. So when they meet in a café, the bold, forward Monika lures the shy, fragile Harry into what begins as a summer of fun, as they steal Harry’s father’s boat and head out to their own private hideaway, but ends up as something very different. Bergman boils down an entire relationship — courtship, romance, children, breakup, in a way a precursor to his later epic, Scenes from a Marriage — into ninety-seven sharp, intuitive moments, turning clichéd plot twists into subtle statements on life and family. Cinematographer Gunnar Fischer shoots the film in a dark, gloomy black-and-white, with stark close-ups — Monika stares directly into the camera at one point, challenging the audience — and long shots of water and nature, while Erik Nordgren’s score is kept spare, with Bergman favoring natural sound and light.
Harriet Andersson stars as a fierce, independent spirit in Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika
Andersson, who would go on to make many more films with Bergman, including Sawdust and Tinsel, Smiles of a Summer Night, Cries and Whispers, and Fanny and Alexander, is enticing as Monika, who doesn’t mind stepping on people’s souls while asserting herself as an independent woman, while Ekborg, who had a small part in Bergman’s The Magician, shows plenty of vulnerability as Harry, who wants to do the right thing and is ready to at least try to be a grown-up when things get complicated. The film is still shocking after all these years, and still rings true. “I want summer to go on just like this,” Monika says. But there are always other seasons, and more summers, to come.
David Hockney works on his masterpiece in Jack Hazan’s A Bigger Splash
A BIGGER SPLASH (Jack Hazan, 1974)
Metrograph
Monday, July 8, 4:00pm metrograph.com
In June 2019, Metrograph premiered a 4K restoration of Jack Hazan’s pivotal 1974 A Bigger Splash, a fiction-nonfiction hybrid that was a breakthrough work for its depiction of gay culture as well as its inside look at the fashionable and chic Los Angeles art scene of the early 1970s. In November 2018, David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at auction for $90.3 million, the most ever paid for a work by a living artist. A Bigger Splash, named after another of Hockney’s paintings — both are part of a series of canvases set around pools in ritzy Los Angeles — takes place over three years, as the British artist, based in California at the time, hangs out with friends, checks out a fashion show, prepares for a gallery exhibition, and works on Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) in the wake of a painful breakup with his boyfriend, model, and muse, Peter Schlesinger, who is a key figure in the painting.
It’s often hard to know which scenes are pure documentary and which are staged for the camera as Hazan and his then-parter, David Mingay, who served as director of photography, tag along with Hockney, who rides around in his small, dirty BMW, meeting up with textile designer Celia Birtwell, fashion designer Ossie Clark, curator Henry Geldzahler, gallerist John Kasmin, artist Patrick Procktor, and others, who are identified only at the beginning, in black-and-white sketches during the opening credits. The film features copious amounts of male nudity, including a long sex scene between two men, a group of beautiful boys diving into a pool in a fantasy sequence, and Hockney disrobing and taking a shower. Hockney’s assistant, Mo McDermott, contributes occasional voice-overs; he also poses as the man standing on the deck in Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), only to be replaced by Schlesinger later. There are several surreal moments involving Hockney’s work: He cuts up one painting; Geldzahler gazes long and hard at himself in the double portrait of him and Christopher Scott; and Hockney tries to light the cigarette Procktor is holding in a painting as Procktor watches, cigarette in hand, mimicking his pose on canvas. At one point Hockney is photographing Schlesinger in Kensington Gardens, reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, which questions the very nature of capturing reality on film.
Hockney was so upset when he first saw A Bigger Splash, which Hazan made for about twenty thousand dollars, that he offered to buy it back from Hazan in order to destroy it; Hazan refused, and Hockney went into a deep depression. His friends ultimately convinced him that it was a worthwhile movie and he eventually accepted it. It’s a one-of-a-kind film, a wild journey that goes far beyond the creative process as an artist makes his masterpiece. Hockney, who will turn eighty-six on July 9, has been on quite a roll of late. He was the subject of a 2016 documentary by Randall Wright, was widely hailed for his 2018 Met retrospective, saw one of his paintings set an auction record, and had a major show at the Morgan Library in 2020-21, “David Hockney: Drawing from Life.” In addition, Catherine Cusset’s novel, Life of David Hockney, was published in 2019 in English, a fictionalized tale that conceptionally recalls A Bigger Splash.
Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) are back together again in Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight
BEFORE MIDNIGHT (Richard Linklater, 2013)
Metrograph
Friday July 12, 4:15
Saturday July 13, noon metrograph.com/film
Unable to resist revisiting the characters who first fell in love in 1995’s Before Sunrise and again in 2004’s Before Sunset, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy reprise their roles as Jesse and Celine, respectively, in Richard Linklater’s absolutely wonderful Before Midnight. The couple first met on a train to Vienna in 1994, talking at length about their hopes and desires and planning on getting together in six months’ time, but they don’t reconnect for another nine years, when Celine comes to one of Jesse’s book signings in Paris. In real time, they walk around the City of Light, catching up on what has happened in their lives as Jesse prepares to take a plane back home to his wife and son. And now another nine years have passed, and Jesse and Celine are living together, the parents of twins (Charlotte and Jennifer Prior). As the film opens, the divorced Jesse is putting his teenage son, Hank (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick), on a plane after having spent the summer together in Greece. What follows is a marvelous fourteen-minute scene of Jesse driving down a mountain road as he and Celine essentially let the audience know what has occurred over the last nine years: They have twin girls (sleeping in the back), Celine has been offered an important environmental job, and Jesse is considering moving to Chicago to be closer to Hank. They return to a country estate owned by Patrick (award-winning cinematographer Walter Lassally, making his acting debut at the age of eighty-six), who is hosting an outdoor lunch with a group of friends (including French actress Ariane Labed, coproducer and filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari, and Xenia Kalogeropoulou, who came out of retirement to appear in her first picture since 1985). They all talk of life and love, with Celine being particularly charming. But when Jesse and Celine go off to a hotel room for what is supposed to be a romantic rendezvous, some things are said and truths revealed that complicate things.
Cowriters Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke explore life and love in Greece in third film about Celine and Jesse
As with the first two films, Before Midnight consists of long takes of Jesse and Celine discussing their past, present, and future as cowriters Linklater (Slacker, Dazed and Confused), Delpy, and Hawke, who were nominated for an Oscar for their script for Before Sunset, continue to explore these engaging characters; both the dialogue and the acting have matured with an intelligent grace and elegance that are captivating. The couple wanders around Messinia examining their lives as only fortysomethings can, trying to figure out whether what they have is what they want. The central focus, though, once again is time, whether it is the years Jesse and Celine have spent together, the time they have left, time as a concept in Jesse’s semiautobiographical novels, or Jesse making a joke about being a time traveler. It’s been eighteen years since we first met Jesse and Celine, and we’ve grown eighteen years older too, lending fascinating perspectives that can’t help but force us to take a look at our own lives as well. The trilogy is America’s version of François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel series, filled with humor, lyricism, and an inherent understanding of twenty-first-century realities. Will there be a fourth film? As of now, the principals aren’t saying because they just don’t know, but Before Midnight ends on just about the perfect ambiguous note.
Margot (Amanda Langlet) and Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud) contemplate love and friendship in Éric Rohmer’s A Tale of Summer
A TALE OF SUMMER (CONTE D’ÉTÉ) (Éric Rohmer, 1996)
Friday, July 26, 2:00
Sunday, July 28, 11:30 am metrograph.com
French New Wave auteur Éric Rohmer’s 1996 A Tale of Summer, the third of his seasonal 1990s stories following A Tale of Winter and A Tale of Springtime and preceding the finale, A Tale of Autumn, is a bittersweet romance about the follies of young love. In a seaside Breton resort town in the 1970s, musician and mathematician Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud) awaits the arrival of his girlfriend, Lena (Aurélia Nolin), who has not been answering his phone calls or returning his letters. He strikes up a perhaps platonic relationship with waitress-ethnologist Margot (Amanda Langlet), whose boyfriend is off in the Peace Corps. When Gaspard makes a move on Margot, she instead encourages him to go out with the free-spirited Solene (Gwenaëlle Simon). Soon Gaspard finds himself lost among three beautiful women, forced to make choices that he’s clearly not ready for.
Strikingly photographed by Rohmer favorite Diane Baratier in a subdued, ’70s-style palette, A Tale of Summer is a charmingly insightful and frustrating exploration of young love, desire, and commitment in which a group of attractive twentysomethings are caught between just wanting to have some fun and plotting out their future. It’s ironic that Gaspard is a mathematician, as he seems to have trouble as soon as he gets to the number three. Meanwhile, it’s appropriate that the ever-wise and knowing Margot (played with a captivating and alluring ease by Pauline at the Beach star Langlet) is an ethnologist, as she carefully studies Gaspard and others as she makes her way through life. Rohmer made A Summer’s Tale when he was seventy-five; the former editor of Cahiers du cinéma would go on to direct four more films before his death in 2010 at the age of eighty-nine. After eighteen years, A Tale of Summer, which premiered at Cannes in 1996, finally got its U.S. theatrical release in 2014 in a new HD restoration, and it is always a lovely way to continue the summer movie season.
