Who: Janet Biggs and Scott MacDonald
What: Panel discussion and book launch
Where: Cristin Tierney Gallery, 219 Bowery, second floor, 212-594-0550
When: Thursday, July 11, free with advance RSVP, 6:30
Why: In his new book, The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama (Oxford University Press, August 1, 2019, $125), author and film history professor Scott MacDonald writes of visual artist Janet Biggs, “I first became aware of Biggs when she visited Hamilton College in the spring of 2017 to present a talk about her work. As she showed stills and clips from recent videos, I was struck by the fact that Biggs had traveled to and filmed particular far-flung locations that I had been introduced to by other filmmakers. . . . I was interested not only that multiple artists would be drawn to these precise locations, but also that, in somewhat different ways, these locations can be dangerous to visit. As I became familiar with Biggs’s work, I came to wonder why an artist would go through the considerable difficulties of visiting distant, potentially dangerous locations, not in order to produce films that might have substantial audiences, but to offer relatively brief visual experiences to comparatively smaller audiences within gallery and museum spaces. I came to realize that my experiences with Biggs’s work offered an opportunity to explore, at least in a small way, the issue of installation cinema versus theatrical cinema.” The book continues with an interview between MacDonald and Biggs that was conducted online.
On July 11, MacDonald and Biggs will be together in person at the Cristin Tierney Gallery for a discussion on film and art in conjunction with the publication of The Sublimity of Document and Biggs’s most recent exhibition, “Overview Effect,” the second part of which, Seeing Constellations in the Darkness between Stars, continues at Cristin Tierney through August 2. MacDonald’s book features interviews with Biggs and more than two dozen other “avant-doc” filmmakers, including Ron Fricke, Laura Poitras, Frederick Wiseman, Bill Morrison, Abbas Kiarostami, and James Benning. Biggs has also contributed the article “Fragility Curve” to the current edition of the Brooklyn Rail, writing about her experiences making her latest films, which deal with Mars. “The earth will remake itself and survive the legacy of its human inhabitants, but will we?” she asks. The conversation with Biggs and MacDonald will be followed by a book signing; in addition, Biggs, who has participated in two twi-ny talks, will be presenting the multimedia performance piece How the Light Gets In July 18 at the New Museum.
Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie was meant to be a kind of public eulogy for her beloved mother, Natalia (Nelly) Akerman, who died in 2014 at the age of eighty-six, shortly after Chantal had completed shooting forty hours of material with her. But it also ended up becoming, in its own way, a public eulogy for the highly influential Belgian auteur herself, as she died on October 5, 2015, at the age of sixty-five, only a few months after the film screened to widespread acclaim at several festivals (except at Locarno, where it was actually booed). Her death was reportedly a suicide, following a deep depression brought on by the loss of her mother. IFC is presenting a special screening on July 9, introduced by Akerman translator Corina Copp, who will read from Akerman’s final book, My Mother Laughs. 
Identity theft was much different in the sixteenth century than it is today. Daniel Vigne’s award-winning 1982 drama, The Return of Martin Guerre, relates the based-on-fact story of a man who has come back to the small, poor village of Artigat in the French countryside after being away for nearly a decade, fighting a war and journeying across Europe. “You will not regret having followed this story, for it is neither a tale of adventure nor an imaginary fable,” a narrator says at the beginning of the film. “It is a true story.” It also looks and sounds better than ever, in a lovely 4K director’s cut restoration opening at the Quad on July 5. The rather quiet and dull Martin Guerre (Stéphane Pean) disappears one night in 1542, to the consternation of his wife, Bertrande de Rols (first Sylvie Méda, then Nathalie Baye). She raises their son, Sanxi Guerre (Adrien Duquesne), by herself, with the help of her family, and remains faithful to Martin, believing he will return. Years later, Martin (Gérard Depardieu) suddenly shows up, more educated and worldly, filled with tales of his time away. The villagers are quick to welcome him back into the fold, including Bertrande and Sanxi; Martin’s sister Guillemette (Valérie Chassigneux); their uncle Pierre (Maurice Barrier), who has run the farm and married Bertrande’s mother, Raimonde de Rols (Rose Thiéry); and Martin’s friend Jacques (Philippe Babin). But slowly some of the peasants start questioning whether this Martin is actually an imposter taking advantage of Bertrande and Artigat, which leads to the arrival of Jean de Coras (Roger Planchon) of the Toulouse Parlement to interview Bertrande.
When Audition opened in 1999 at Film Forum, it was New Yorkers’ major introduction to the work of Japanese director Takashi Miike — and some cineastes ran out of the theater faster than they lined up around the block to get in in the first place. The shocking, unconventional psychosexual horror classic, which won the FIPRESCI Prize and the KNF Award at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, is now back in a 2K twentieth-anniversary restoration that will likely have people lining up at Metrograph, where it opens July 3. But this is a different (#MeToo, social-media-obsessed) era, so don’t expect many walkouts, although there will be plenty of head-turning and face-covering. There also will be a critical reevaluation of the film’s central concept, a misogynistic male fantasy that evolves into torture/revenge porn.
