this week in film and television

PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN

Ava Gardner and James Mason star as the title characters in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman

PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN (Albert Lewin, 1951)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, February 7
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com

Writer, director, and producer Albert Lewin transports a seventeenth-century legend to a 1930s fishing village on the Mediterranean coast of Spain in 1951’s Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, which now can be seen in a lush and lascivious 4K restoration at the Quad. Douglas Sirk meets Ernest Hemingway in the Technicolor melodrama, lavishly photographed by Jack Cardiff and narrated in flashback by dilettante archaeologist and historian Geoffrey Fielding (Harold Warrender), who occasionally addresses the audience directly. Ava Gardner stars as Pandora, a spectacularly beautiful femme fatale who is loved by many men but is unable to experience true love herself. A fiery, unpredictable woman, she is chased by milquetoast gadfly Reggie Demarest (Marius Goring), champion racecar driver Stephen Cameron (Nigel Patrick), and bullfighter Juan Montalvo (Mario Cabré) — even Geoffrey is deeply attracted to her but doesn’t profess his desire openly. She basically toys with them, reveling in the admiration but taking advantage of the men, insisting they make sacrifices in order to be with her. “The measure of love is what one is willing to give up for it,” Geoffrey says several times.

When the mysterious Hendrik van der Zee (James Mason) arrives on his yacht, apparently without any crew, Pandora is immediately intrigued. She swims out naked to him and finds him working on a surrealist painting of a woman who looks remarkably like her. (The de Chirico-like canvas was painted by scenic artist and art director Ferdinand Bellan, inspired by Man Ray, a close friend of Lewin’s who served as an on-set photographer, designed the chess set in the film, and painted a portrait of Gardner that is not shown, although a small photo he took of her is seen.) When Geoffrey begins to suspect that Hendrik may be the Flying Dutchman of legend, a ship captain who killed his wife in a jealous rage and is condemned to roam the seas, seeking a woman who will be willing to die for his love so he can break free of his cursed existence, Pandora becomes even more entranced, which does not make her other suitors very happy.

Ava Gardner poses for a photo by on-set photographer Man Ray on the Spanish coast

Cardiff (The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus) has a field day with Gardner, who is captivatingly seductive in Beatrice Dawson’s spectacular costumes, giving Rita Hayworth’s hair flip in Gilda a run for its money. In the restoration, done by the Cohen Media Group and the George Eastman Museum’s Film Preservation Services using a print owned by Martin Scorsese as reference, she is even more like a Greek goddess; in fact, her character is named after the first human woman created by Hephaestus at an angry Zeus’s command, and she is armed with a container that holds all the world’s evil. “From her is the race of women and female kind: / of her is the deadly race and tribe of women who / live amongst mortal men to their great trouble, / no helpmates in hateful poverty, but only in wealth,” the poet Hesiod wrote of Pandora nearly three thousand years ago. Meanwhile, Ray said of Gardner, “She was absolutely ravishing. No film, I thought, had ever done her justice. And as a model, no one with my experience with mannequins and professionals surpassed her.” There are a pair of ancient-looking statues in the film that Pandora passes by; Ray took a famous glamour shot of Gardner posing next to one of them, and a statue of Gardner stands in Tossa de Mar, where much of the film was shot.

Just as Pandora has her lovers, so did Gardner, who was twenty-eight when Pandora was released. She reportedly had an affair with Cabré, a real-life toreador, while making the movie, causing her soon-to-be third husband, Frank Sinatra, to come to Spain to fight for her. It’s a Hemingway-esque twist in a film filled with Papa mannerisms; Gardner, a close friend of Hemingway’s, had previously appeared in The Killers and would go on to star in The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Sun Also Rises, all based on Hemingway works. In addition, she once swam naked in Hemingway’s Havana pool, after which Papa supposedly ordered his staff, “The water is not to be emptied.”

Gardner and Mason are an impassioned duo in Pandora, their potential romance bathed in a haunting surrealism. Brooklyn-born Irving Thalberg protégé Lewin directed only five other films in his career, including The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Moon in Sixpence; he passed away in New York City in 1968 at the age of seventy-three, having also written a forgotten novel, The Unaltered Cat, about a man married to a were-cat. The jacket features a painting by Man Ray.

CANE RIVER

The prodigal son returns in restoration of Horace B. Jenkins’s long-lost Cane River

CANE RIVER (Horace B. Jenkins, 1982)
BAMfilm, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
February 7-20
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

After nearly forty years, Horace B. Jenkins’s Cane River is finally being released theatrically, playing at BAM Rose Cinemas from February 7 to 20, not uncoincidentally during Black History Month. Shortly after its premiere in 1982, Jenkins died at the age of forty-two and the film disappeared without distribution. The original negative was found in 2013 in the DuArt Film & Video Vault and is now screening in a new 4K digital restoration overseen by IndieCollect. Cane River is a touching love story set amid colorism, classism, misogynoir, and the far-reaching tentacles of slavery in Natchitoches Parish in Louisiana, where tensions between blacks, whites, and Creoles have festered for hundreds of years.

A cast of mostly first-time actors (many in their only film) is led by Richard Romain as Peter Metoyer, a college football star who returns to his rural hometown of Cane River instead of pursuing a gridiron career; he was drafted by the New York Jets but would rather be a poet and a writer, choosing to help run the family farm with his father (Lloyd La Cour) and sister, Dominique (Barbara Tasker). One day he is visiting the Melrose plantation — where his ancestor Marie Thérèse Coincoin became a freed slave and successful land owner who married French merchant Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer, had ten children, and controversially kept slaves as well — when he meets eighteen-year-old Maria Mathis (Tommye Myrick), who is getting ready to leave for college at Xavier. She is reading The Forgotten People: Cane River’s Creoles of Color by Gary B. Mills, a book partly about the very real Metoyer family history and the Melrose plantation. She is so desperate to get away from the boring and staid Cane River while he has come back to make a calm, easygoing life there. Despite his being a Catholic Creole and her being a black southern Baptist, they fall in love, which angers her mother (Carol Sutton), but Maria doesn’t want to stay, adamant to not get caught in the trap her brother (Ilunga Adell) is in, working in the hatchery, getting drunk, and having no perceptible future. “What is more poetic than planting a seed and watching it grow?” Peter asks Maria, both filled with hope.

A response to the blaxploitation movies of the 1970s and partially inspired by the true story of Jenkins’s longtime partner, Carol Balthazar, who served as a consultant on the project, Cane River is a film entrenched in dichotomy, mixing fact and fiction to explore the inherent differences between the country and the city, in the expectations of men versus women, of factory work and higher education, of flashy convertibles speeding down the highway and horseback rides along a beautiful lake, and, most centrally, the color of one’s skin. “You Creoles are different people,” Maria tells Peter, but that statement is more loaded than she realizes. The low-budget film is too static; cinematographer Gideon Manasseh’s camera seldom moves (although it does focus on many gorgeous natural landscapes), and editor Debi Moore can’t establish a consistent rhythm and pace. The acting is often less than compelling, the script can be overly earnest, and Leroy Glover’s score features songs with lyrics that often repeat exactly what you’re seeing onscreen. But there’s a deep-rooted charm to the film, which explores topics that are still hot-button issues today, especially colorism. “Black folks don’t stand a chance,” one character says, evoking the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement. It’s important to have this film back in circulation, and BAM is celebrating its return by hosting four Q&As opening weekend with Romain, Myrick, Jenkins’s son Sacha, and, at one, his daughter Dominique.

NY INDIE THEATRE FILM FESTIVAL

Attending the NY Indie Theatre Film Festival won’t be as traumatic as visiting Natalie Johnson’s The Taxidermist, which screens on February 8

New Ohio Theatre
154 Christopher St.
February 6-9, individual events free – $10, day/fest passes $15-$30
866-811-4111
newohiotheatre.org

New Ohio Theatre’s fourth annual NY Indie Theatre Film Festival finishes in a big way on February 9 with a special screening of Charles Busch’s 2006 coming-of-age tale A Very Serious Person, in which the writer-director stars as a gay male nurse taking care of an ailing woman portrayed by Polly Bergen. Busch, whose work includes The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, The Tribute Artist, and the current Primary Stages production The Confession of Lily Dare at the Cherry Lane, will participate in a talkback after the screening. The festival begins February 6 at 7:00 with a screenplay reading of Brooke Berman’s Polly Freed with Annie Parisse, Paul Sparks, Sadie Seelert, Alysia Reiner, Jamie Harrold, Austin Ku, Sebastian Martinez, Clara Young, Becca Lish, Erin Gann, and Julienne Kim and a free opening-night party at 9:00. There will be five screening blocks of short films and web series episodes February 7-8, including works written and/or directed by Victoria Clark, David Zayas Jr., Wendy MacLeod, Caroline V. McGraw, and Alyssa May Gold. On February 9 at 2:00, the competitive Film Race will take place, a benefit for F*It Club in which teams present movies they made only after getting required script elements on February 5; at 4:00, the panel discussion “What Makes a Pitch Sizzle?” brings together Thom Woodley, Sarah Donnelly, and Gideon Evans. “Our mission is to support indie theatre artists wherever their inspiration takes them. If it takes them into new mediums, we want to be there to help,” New Ohio artistic director Robert Lyons said in a statement. Individual events are $5 to $10, with day or festival passes ranging from $15 to $30.

BEANPOLE

Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko) deals with horrific tragedy in Kantemir Balagov’s Beanpole

BEANPOLE (Дылда) (Kantemir Balagov, 2019)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Through February 11
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

Russia’s official submission for the Oscar for Best International Film, for which it was shortlisted, Kantemir Balagov’s Beanpole is an unsparing look at PTSD in women, here specifically in WWII but also more generally as mothers and caretakers. In 1945 Leningrad, Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko) is a very tall, quiet, former anti-aircraft gunner working in a military hospital for men with severe injuries. She is particularly drawn to Stepan (Konstantin Balakirev), who is paralyzed. She has a condition in which her body freezes, as if trapped in a limbo between life and death, and it horrifically leads to tragedy. Iya’s best friend and lover, Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina), returns from the front, bearing a frightening scar. She deviously sets out to have a child, involving the oddball Sasha (Igor Shirokov) and the head of the hospital, Nikolay (Andrey Bykov), which confuses and deeply upsets Iya.

Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina) and Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko) try to put their lives back together after fighting in WWII in Beanpole

Inspired by Belarus author Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel Prize-winning 1987 book The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of World War II, Balagov’s second film, following his 2017 drama, Closeness, is a thoroughly unpredictable and purposefully uncomfortable journey into the minds of men and, more specifically, women shell-shocked by war. In their film debuts, Miroshnichenko and Perelygina are mesmerizing; cinematographer Ksenia Sereda zeroes in on Miroshnichenko’s head and Perelygina’s face as if they are characters unto themselves. The film’s palette is ochre-based, with explosions of bright yellows, reds, and especially greens — the color of rebirth, renewal, and envy — which pop up in wallpaper, paint, Iya’s sweater, and Masha’s dress. It’s a world in which women, after experiencing such pain and suffering, are expected to get married and pregnant amid all the death surrounding them. Balagov won Un Certain Regard’s Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival for this stark, brutal portrayal of average people looking for love amid the ruins. It might be set in 1945, dealing with the aftereffects of the Siege of Leningrad and what it did to the soul of the Russian city, but its exploration of the physical and psychological trauma of war is as relevant today as it was then.

JOSÉ

José (Enrique Salanic) and Luis (Manolo Herrera) look to the stars in Queer Lion award winner

JOSÉ (Li Cheng, 2018)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, January 31
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com/film/jose
www.outsiderpictures.us

At one point in Li Cheng’s gentle, beautifully sensitive José, the title character (Enrique Salanic) is consoling his friend and coworker, Monica (Jhakelyn Waleska Gonzalez), as an airplane passes far off in the distance and José catches a glimpse of it just before it disappears from view. In the very next scene, José is walking determinedly toward the camera as a flock of birds wheels in the sky behind him. The meaning is clear: José is trapped in his situation, unable to fly; he’s barely scraping by at an unfulfilling, low-paying job, taking care of his mother (Ana Cecilia Mota), and unable to live his life in Guatemala — or anywhere else — as a nineteen-year-old gay man out in the open. In a bizarre turn, Salanic has been denied a visa to come to America to support the US theatrical release of the film, which begins January 31 at the Quad. He has traveled all over the world with José, which won the Queer Lion at the seventy-fifth annual Venice Film Festival, but the US embassy explained, “You have not demonstrated that you have the ties that will compel you to return to your home country after your travel to the United States.” The rejection is doubly strange given that Salanic went to school in Missouri and Canada, and, in the film, his character feels like he cannot leave his religious mother to pursue his own hopes and dreams.

José (Enrique Salanic) comforts Monica (Jhakelyn Waleska Gonzalez) in Li Cheng’s José

Gorgeously photographed by cinematographer Paolo Giron with a sharp sense of place and pace and compassionately written by Cheng and fellow producer George F Roberson, the film follows José as he explores first love with Luis (Manolo Herrera). José works at a dobladas restaurant, trying to lure in cars that are driving by a busy corner. He works with Monica and her boyfriend, Carlos (Esteban Lopez Ramirez), carefully overseen by their manager (Cesar Lorenzo Yojcom Candido). José doesn’t say much; he just goes about his daily business, taking walks, riding the bus, and sneaking away to spend time with other men, primarily Luis. There are numerous graphic sex scenes in the film, tinged with both sweetness and sadness. In only his second film and first as a lead, Salanic, who is of Mayan descent, is softly riveting, commanding the camera like a pro.

The plot rings true every step of the way: The film often has a cinéma-vérité feel; all the actors are nonprofessionals, evoking Italian neo-Realism and the work of Hou Hsiao-hsien, using natural light and sound whenever possible. The Chinese-born Cheng and American native Roberson, both of whom have PhDs and previously collaborated on 2014’s Joshua Tree, lived in Guatemala for two years researching and making the film, which they funded themselves; they interviewed hundreds of young people in the twenty largest Latin American cities across twelve countries, asking three main questions: “Which person are you closest to in your life? What’s your most unforgettable memory? Have you been in love?” The result is a film that is a stark portrait of today’s youth in a troubled, difficult world with limited options, whether gay or straight, where refugees are treated like villains and turned away at borders and children are ripped away from their parents. But the film has hope; we have faith that José will ultimately find his path, although the search is likely to be long and arduous. Cheng will be at the Quad for several Q&As January 31 to February 2, moderated by Before Stonewall codirector Robert Rosenberg or NewFest’s Nick McCarthy, but, alas, no Salanic.

FIRST SATURDAYS: FUTURA NOIR

Common will sit down for a fireside chat as part of Brooklyn Museum First Saturday program this week

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, February 1, free (some events require advance tickets), 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum has a wide-ranging program with several surprises for its annual Black History Month edition of its free First Saturday gathering. There will be live performances by Topaz Jones, Niles Luther, NVR Sleep (Rodney Hazard, Mikey, Fab Roc, and ClassicNewWave), and Bri Blvck; an Ancestral Healing sound bath from HealHaus, with intention-setting by Omar Davis and a sound bath facilitated by Phyllicia Bonanno; a screening of Billy Gerard Frank’s 2019 short film Second Eulogy: Mind the Gap, followed by a talkback with artist and activist Renee Cox, artist Christopher Udemezue, and Frank, moderated by writer and curator Ebony L. Haynes; a Scholar Talk with Niama Safia Sandy on race, power, nationalism, and imperialism; a curator tour of “Jacques-Louis David Meets Kehinde Wiley” led by Lisa Small and Eugenie Tsai; teen apprentice pop-up gallery talks focusing on works by Black artists in the American Art galleries; a hands-on art workshop where participants can make an urban garden, inspired by Kehinde Wiley; a poetry reading with Osyris Antham, Chanice Hughes-Greenberg, and Cyrée Jarelle Johnson; and “Real People: A Fireside Chat with Common,” a conversation with artist, actor, and activist Common (Lonnie Rashid Lynn), moderated by Peloton cycling instructor Tunde Oyeneyin. In addition, the galleries will be open late so you can check out “Jacques-Louis David Meets Kehinde Wiley,” “Out of Place: A Feminist Look at the Collection,” “One: Xu Bing,” “JR: Chronicles,” and more.

BLACK WOMEN — TRAILBLAZING AFRICAN AMERICAN ACTRESSES & IMAGES, 1920 – 2001: WITHIN OUR GATES

Sylvia Landry (Evelyn Preer) seeks to raise money to expand education for black children in Within Our Gates

WITHIN OUR GATES (Oscar Micheaux, 1920) / ST. LOUIS BLUES (Dudley Murphy, 1929)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Tuesday, January 28, 6:35
Series continues through February 13
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

#OscarsSoWhite and #OscarsSoMale have you disappointed and mad? Film Forum is offering just the medicine with its four-week, sixty-film festival “Black Women: Trailblazing African American Actresses & Images, 1920 – 2001.” Running through February 13, the wide-ranging series consists of movies starring Hattie McDaniel, Dorothy Dandridge, Cicely Tyson, Ethel Waters, Josephine Baker, Diana Ross, Angela Bassett, Diahann Carroll, Oprah Winfrey, Juanita Moore, Whoopi Goldberg, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Ruby Dee, Eartha Kitt, Abbey Lincoln, Gloria Foster, Ella Fitzgerald, Vonetta McGee, Alfre Woodard, Lonette McKee, Lynn Whitfield, Janet Jackson, Queen Latifah, Pam Grier, Tamara Dobson, Whitney Houston, Halle Berry, and many others, made by black, white, male, and female directors. The oldest film being presented is the oldest surviving film made by an African American director, Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates, on January 28 at 6:35. A response to D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, Micheaux’s film, released in 1920 after trouble with the censor board, packs a whole lot into its seventy-nine minutes, giving the film an epic feel as it deals with violent crime, rape, slavery, poverty, education, love quadrangles, Jim Crow, subservient blacks, mixed-race romance, the Great Migration, and other incendiary topics.

within our gates

“I have always tried to make my photoplays present the truth, to lay before the Race a cross-section of its own life, to view the Colored heart from close range,” Micheaux explained on January 24, 1925. “It is only by presenting those portions of the Race portrayed in my pictures, in the light and background of their true state, that we can raise our people to greater heights. . . . The recognition of our true situation will react in itself as a stimulus for self-advancement.” He does just that with Within Our Gates, in which Evelyn Preer plays Sylvia Landry, a young woman in love with Conrad Drebert (James D. Ruffin). However, Sylvia’s supposed friend, the manipulative Alma Prichard (Floy Clements), is also in love with Conrad and determined to steal him from her. Meanwhile, Alma’s stepbrother, gangster Larry Prichard (Jack Chenault), wants Sylvia, who is not interested in him. Larry is being closely watched by a detective, Philip Gentry (William Smith), who was tipped off by the FBI as to his whereabouts.

A car accident leads Sylvia to meet Dr. V. Vivian (Charles D. Lucas) and philanthropist Elena Warwick (Mrs. Evelyn), who wants to help Sylvia, but Elena’s friend, the racist Geraldine Stratton (Bernice Ladd), would rather see no women gain the right to vote if a new amendment would include black women as well. The story shifts gears when Alma tells Dr. Vivian about Sylvia’s past, involving Sylvia’s adopted family, a robbery and shooting, a white landlord (Ralph Johnson) and his brother (Grant Gorman), and a tattletale Uncle Tom (E. G. Tatum) seeking to gain favors, all shown in flashback. It’s a complex tale filled with surprising twists, and it’s a critically important film in the history of black cinema.

Micheaux’s first work was The Homesteader, which is lost; he would go on to make such pictures as Body and Soul, Veiled Aristocrats, and Underworld. The Library of Congress Motion Picture Conservation Center restored Within Our Gates in 1993 from a lone Spanish print, so most intertitles were rewritten in English, and a section in the middle was lost. In 2016, DJ Spooky (aka Paul D. Miller) added a guitar-and-piano-based soundtrack, but the Film Forum screening of a 35mm print will be accompanied by a live score played by Steve Sterner. In addition, it will be preceded by Dudley Murphy’s sixteen-minute 1929 short St. Louis Blues, highlighted by Bessie Smith in her only film appearance. The series continues with such films as both Foxy Brown and Jackie Brown, The Color Purple, Set It Off, Lady Sings the Blues, Monster’s Ball, and Dirty Gertie from Harlem U.S.A.