Who:Nicca Ray,Chris Desjardins,Peter Carlaftes What: Virtual book launch with reading and conversation Where:Three Rooms PressFacebook and YouTube When: Wednesday, April 29, free, 8:00 Why: Born in Wisconsin in 1911, Raymond Nicholas Kienzle Jr. would go on to change Hollywood as Nicholas Ray, a genre-redefining auteur who directed such films as They Live by Night, In a Lonely Place, Johnny Guitar, Rebel without a Cause, Bigger Than Life, and King of Kings. A controversial figure who had drug and alcohol problems and was married four times, including a short-lived, tempestuous union with Gloria Grahame, Ray had four children, including Nicca Ray, who was born in 1964; her mother was dancer Betty Utley, who divorced Ray that same year. Ray would not play a part in Nicca’s life for another decade before passing away in 1979. Nicca takes a unique look at who her father was, especially during those missing ten years, in her thoroughly researched memoir/biography, Ray by Ray: A Daughter’s Take on the Legend of Nicholas Ray (Three Rooms Press, April 2020, $20). On April 29 at 8:00, Three Rooms Press cofounder Peter Carlaftes will host a live virtual book launch on Three Rooms Press’s Facebook and YouTube pages, featuring a reading by Nicca, followed by a conversation between Nicca and punk rocker, poet, actor, director, Upsetter Records cofounder, and Flesh Eaters and Divine Horsemen band member Chris (Chris D.) Desjardins, discussing Nicholas Ray’s films, punk rock, creativity without drugs, and more.
Rosalind Chao lights up the screen in Nancy Kelly’s long-forgotten 1990 Western melodrama Thousand Pieces of Gold, which has been revived in a beautiful 4K restoration from IndieCollect, which begins its virtual release this weekend through BAM in New York and the Autry Museum in LA. Adapted by Anne Makepeace from Ruthanne Lum McCunn’s 1981 historical novel, the feminist epic is set in 1880, when Lalu (Chao), born in a tiny village in northern China, is sold by her father into slavery, winding up in a small mining town in Idaho. Her owner, Hong King (Michael Paul Chan), is a prominent gambler who runs the local brothel and has plans to exploit Lalu, renamed China Polly, as an exotic prostitute well worth higher prices.
But Lalu, strong-willed and determined, refuses to give in, fighting the seemingly inevitable fate of joining Berthe (Beth Broderick) and the other whores. The only people on her side are Jim (Dennis Dun), a Chinese man who transported her from San Francisco to Idaho and regrets his role in the deal, and Charlie (Chris Cooper), who runs the saloon and finds an aching humanity in Lalu; he stands up for her when such lowdown and dirty men as Jonas (Jimmie F. Skaggs), Miles (Will Oldham), and Ohio (David Hayward) either line up to be with her or look the other way when she is abused. Every time Lalu, a smart, brave woman who picks up English quickly, thinks she has found a way out, circumstances beyond her control keep her trapped in her horrific situation, one that she refuses to accept.
Hong King (Michael Paul Chan) and Charlie (Chris Cooper) argue over a Chinese woman’s freedom in epic feminist Western
Watching the film today, it’s hard to imagine that it’s Kelly’s only fiction movie; she continues to make documentaries, which have included A Cowhand’s Song, Rebels with a Cause, Trust: Second Acts in Young Lives, and Smitten, but the Hollywood system did not welcome her, much like Lalu was not welcomed in America. Kelly is in full command of the story, which is gorgeously photographed by Bobby Bukowski and keenly edited by Kenji Yamamoto, Kelly’s husband and longtime filmmaking partner, along with a vivid score by seven-time Emmy winner Gary Malkin. The camera loves Chao (Joy Luck Club, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine): Her deeply expressive eyes dominate the screen and envelop the viewer in heartfelt emotion. Oscar winner Cooper (Seabiscuit, Adaptation.) is tender and warm as Charlie, channeling Jon Bon Jovi along the way.
Based on the true story of Chinese pioneer Lalu Nathoy, Thousand Pieces of Gold has been rereleased at just the right time — the digital restoration debuted in March 2019 at the Museum of the Moving Image — as it relates to such current hot-button issues as the #metoo movement, immigration, racism aimed specifically at the Chinese, human trafficking, and economic inequality. On April 29 at 8:00, there will be what should be a fascinating live panel discussion with Kelly, Yamamoto, Makepeace, Chao, and Cooper.
Free livestream screening of Looking for Langston will be followed by panel discussion
Who:Zohra Saed,LaTasha Diggs, Paolo Javier What: Live online film screening and panel discussion Where:Poets House Twitter feed When: Friday, April 24, free with RSVP, 4:00 Why: As part of its series “Made in Harlem: Remembering the Renaissance,”Maysles Documentary Center is teaming up with Poets House to present a live online screening of Looking for Langston,Isaac Julien’s forty-five-minute 1989 docudrama about Hughes, the twentieth-century poet, playwright, and novelist who chronicled black and gay life and culture in America in such books as The Weary Blues and Not without Laughter. The London-born Julien is a multimedia installation artist who has made such other films as Western Union: Small Boats and Ten Thousand Waves. The 4:00 screening, free with RSVP, will be followed by a panel discussion on Hughes’s literary legacy, Julien’s cinematic style, and the hundredth anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance with Brooklyn-based Afghan American poet Zohra Saed and Harlem-based writer, vocalist, and sound artist LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, moderated by Poets House program director and former Queens poet laureate Paolo Javier.
Beyond the Visible profiles the life and work of master abstractionist Hilma af Klint
BEYOND THE VISIBLE: HILMA AF KLINT (Halina Dyrschka, 2019)
Opens virtually April 17, $12 (good for one-week pass)
Live Q&A on April 18 at 3:00 kinonow.com zeitgeistfilms.com
In 2013, a new hero burst onto the art scene, despite being dead for nearly seventy years. First came “Hilma af Klint — A Pioneer of Abstraction,” by all accounts an eye-opening show that toured Europe, followed five years later by the smash Guggenheim exhibit “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future,” which propelled the extraordinary work of the Swedish abstractionist into the mainstream. I fondly remember making my way through the show, mouth agape at the many wonders I was seeing. German director Halina Dyrschka continues the celebration of this previously little-known painter in the documentary Beyond the Visible — Hilma af Klint, which will be available for streaming April 17 through Kino Marquee in association with BAM in Brooklyn and Laemmle Monica Film Center in Los Angeles. Dyrschka and Guggenheim assistant curator David Max Horowitz will participate in a Zoom Q&A with BAM on April 18 at 3:00.
In her debut full-length film, Dyrschka digs deep into who af Klint was, what inspired her unique achievements, and why she had been overlooked until the 2010s. “Now we have a real scandal,” German art critic and af Klint biographer Julia Voss says. “Suddenly, more than fifty years after history was written, completely out of the blue, at least for the general public, we discover this woman who painted abstract works before Kandinsky, creating this huge oeuvre, fully independently, and by a kind of miracle it’s all stayed together. It’s like finding a time capsule in Sweden. And now we have to ask: How should we integrate it?”
Born in Stockholm in 1862, af Klint incorporated physics, mathematics, the natural world, and spiritualism into her paintings, abstract canvases that predated Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, who both, like af Klint, died in 1944. She didn’t exhibit any of her work until 1906, and after that only sparingly. Upon her death, her estate was not permitted to show anything for twenty years; her first posthumous exhibition was held in LA in 1986.
“We are not here forever,” Dyrschka narrates early in the film. “So it is not at all astonishing that someone once wondered about what it means to be in the world and how everything fits together — and came up with a huge answer. The strange thing is I only found out about it more than one hundred years later. Art history has to be rewritten.” Among the others lobbying for af Klint’s ascension into the art canon are artists Josiah McEhleny and Monika von Rosen, novelist Anna Laestadius Larsson, art historians Ernst Peter Fischer and Anna Maria Bernitz, Eva-Lena Bengtsson of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, collector Valeria Napoleone, and gallerist Ceri Hand, offering different perspectives of the value and legacy of her her work. Lending more personal insight are Ulla af Klint, the widow of Hilma’s nephew Erik (from a 2001 interview); Johan af Klint, Ulla’s son, who ran the Hilma af Klint Foundation, which oversees the artist’s 1,500 paintings and 26,000 pages in notebooks; and Marie Cassel and Brigitta Giertta, descendants of two of Hilma’s closest friends. Together they paint a compelling portrait of the iconoclastic af Klint, who filled her work with cutting-edge and fringe philosophy and science. But you don’t have to agree with her offbeat world view to fall in love with her gorgeous canvases, many of which are displayed in the film.
The extraordinary canvases of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint are on view in Beyond the Visible
Curator Iris Müller-Westermann explains, “Never in her lifetime did she put any of her abstract work on show. Hilma af Klint’s project was something much grander than what we today call ‘art.’ It was all about seeing the world we live in in a larger context, to understand who we really are in a cosmic perspective.”
Cinematographers Alicja Pahl and Luana Knipfer often let the camera linger on peaceful shots of water, flowers, the sky, and other natural elements that morph into Klint’s paintings and reenactments of af Klint working on a large-scale painting on the floor of her studio. Petra van der Voort reads excerpts from af Klint’s writings in voice-over, narrating from books that we can follow along with, zooming in on her penmanship, while Damian Scholl supplies a wide-ranging, eclectic score.
“She was well educated, she had a mind of her own, and she painted like nobody else,” Johan af Klint says. McElheny points out, “In order to tell the history of abstraction now, you have to rewrite it.” Beyond the Visible confirms that it’s time for a new history.
As part of Focus Features’ free Movie Mondays livestreaming series, director Wes Anderson will participate in a Q&A on April 13 following a 5:00 watch party for his 2012 gem, Moonrise Kingdom. In such unique films as Rushmore,The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Grand Budapest Hotel, black-comedy master Anderson has created a bizarre collection of characters who seem to live in their own alternate realities. In Moonrise Kingdom, he 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 and featuring a lovely score by Alexandre Desplat, Moonrise Kingdom is one of the best films of 2012, by a director whose imagination never ceases to amaze. Focus Movie Mondays continues April 20 with Kevin Smith’s Mallrats and April 27 with Paweł Pawlikowski’s My Summer of Love.
Since May 2001, twi-ny has been recommending cool things to do throughout the five boroughs, popular and under-the-radar events that draw people out of their homes to experience film, theater, dance, art, literature, music, food, comedy, and more as part of a live audience in the most vibrant community on Earth.
With the spread of Covid-19 and the closing of all cultural institutions, sports venues, bars, and restaurants (for dining in), we feel it is our duty to prioritize the health and well-being of our loyal readers. So, for the next several weeks at least, we won’t be covering any public events in which men, women, and children must congregate in groups, a more unlikely scenario day by day anyway.
That said, as George Bernard Shaw once noted, “Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.”
Some parks are still open, great places to breathe in fresh air, feel the sunshine, and watch the changing of winter into spring. We will occasionally be pointing out various statues, sculptures, and installations, but check them out only if you are already going outside and will happen to be nearby.
You don’t have to shut yourself away completely for the next weeks and months — for now, you can still go grocery shopping and pick up takeout — but do think of others as you go about your daily life, which is going to be very different for a while. We want each and every one of you to take care of yourselves and your families, follow the guidelines for social distancing, and consider the health and well-being of those around you.
We look forward to seeing you indoors and at festivals and major outdoor events as soon as possible, once New York, America, and the rest of the planet are ready to get back to business. Until then, you can find us every so often under the sun, moon, clouds, and stars, finding respite in this amazing city now in crisis.
Henry Chalfant’s train photos fill up a wall and more at Bronx Museum exhibit (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Bronx Museum of the Arts
1040 Grand Concourse at 165th St.
Through March 8, free
718-681-6000 www.bronxmuseum.org
In 1985, the MTA began its Arts for Transit and Urban Design program (now known as MTA Arts & Design), connecting art with public transportation. But before that, art and transit went together like oil and water; hence the name of a fab exhibit that continues at the Bronx Museum through March 8, “Henry Chalfant: Art vs. Transit, 1977–1987,” the title of which was also inspired by the late graffiti artist SHY147. After arriving in New York City from Pittsburgh in 1973 and beginning as a sculptor, Chalfant was quickly enamored with street art, train graffiti, and hip-hop culture and started documenting it. Since train graffiti was impermanent — in addition to the MTA relentlessly trying to clean trains, other taggers and writers would spray paint right over existing tags — his photographs often became the only evidence of the work, so much so that soon graffiti artists would call him up to ask him to take pictures of trains and buildings they’d tagged. Chalfant would go to aboveground stations such as Intervale Avenue and East Tremont on the 2 and 5 lines and take multiple photos with his 35mm camera as trains whizzed by; he would then develop the photos and splice them together to create panoramic shots of full trains.
Duster UA visits re-creation of Henry Chalfant’s SoHo studio (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
This first US museum retrospective, which was curated by Spanish graffiti artist SUSO33 for the Centro de Arte Tomás y Valiente in Madrid, includes dozens of Chalfant’s long, rectangular photographs, hung on the walls one above another, from floor to ceiling, exploding in a glorious blaze of colors and shapes, with wild lettering and cartoonish characters. Among the artists whose work he preserved on film are Dondi, Futura, Lady Pink, Lee Quiñones, Zephyr, Blade, Crash, DAZE, Dez, Kel, Mare, SEEN, Skeme, and T-Kid, some of whom are interviewed for a short film made by multimedia, multidisciplinary artist, producer, and chronicler Sacha Jenkins. I was fortunate enough to watch the film, which is screened continuously within a re-creation of Chalfant’s SoHo studio, alongside a graffiti artist who added biting commentary about some of the figures in the film and pointed out one of his pieces as it passed by.
Life-size cloth murals are arranged like train cars at the Bronx museum (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
In the back room, a series of wooden structures are covered with full-length cloth murals to replicate spray-painted subway cars at actual size, while dozens of Chalfant’s photos are projected at the top of a wall at one end of the room, roaring into the station, then pulling out, complete with sound effects. Also on view are some of Chalfant’s notebooks and more than a hundred photographs of the burgeoning street hip-hop culture as well as newspaper and magazine articles and other ephemera. “The story of the neglected children of NYC, victims of poverty, racism, poor schools lacking art and music instruction who overcame their circumstances with creative expression, is a powerful and inspiring one,” Chalfant says in the beautiful bilingual catalog. “There are plenty of examples in the various cultures that emerged from the mean streets of New York that have been a powerful inspiration to youth everywhere. I’m happy and proud to be bringing it home.” The catalog also features essays by Jenkins, Sharp, SUSO33, and Carlos Mare.
Chalfant, a Stanford grad whose 1984 collaboration with Martha Cooper, Subway Art, is the bible of the genre and who coproduced with director Tony Silver the seminal 1983 documentary Style Wars, did the world a great service by capturing these works of art, which turned drab silver train cars into canvases of free expression, where men and women on the margins could scream out for all to experience. Be on the lookout for such photos as “Dondi,” “EYE JAMMIE by AOne,” “Mad (by Seen),” “Style Wars by Noc 167,” and “Stop the Bomb.”
Exhibit extends past New York and into other cities where hip-hop and graffiti blossomed (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
On March 6, the Bronx Museum will host a free screening of Chalfant’s award-winning 2006 documentary, From Mambo to Hip-Hop: A South Bronx Tale; advance registration is recommended here. Also at the museum is the eye-opening “José Parlá: It’s Yours,” a major solo show by the Miami-born, longtime Bronx resident and former street artist known as “Ease”; his dazzling paintings and collages require up-close viewing to fully experience his exploration of gentrification and systemic racism while also celebrating street art and the Bronx.
