this week in film and television

THE RETURN OF MARTIN GUERRE 4K RESTORATION

Gérard Depardieu stars as a man claiming to be a long-missing peasant in Daniel Vigne’s The Return of Martin Guerre

THE RETURN OF MARTIN GUERRE (LE RETOUR DE MARTIN GUERRE) (Daniel Vigne, 1982)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, July 5
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com

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.

A family is reunited in The Return of Martin Guerre — or is it?

Written by honorary Oscar winner Jean-Claude Carrière (Danton, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie) and Vigne (One Woman or Two, Jean de La Fontaine — le défi ) with Natalie Zemon Davis, a Princeton University professor and historian who consulted on the film and later wrote a book on the subject, The Return of Martin Guerre is gorgeously photographed by Andre Neau, inspired by the paintings of Dutch masters Johannes Vermeer and Pieter Brueghel the Elder. The film won three Césars, for Best Original Screenplay, Best Music (Michel Portal), and Best Production Design (Alain Negre), and received a nomination for Most Promising Actor (Dominique Pinon, who would become a mainstay in the films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet), in addition to an Oscar nod for Best Costume Design (Anne-Marie Marchand); it was also remade by Jon Amiel in 1993 as the Civil War drama Sommersby with Richard Gere and Jodie Foster. Depardieu is big and boisterous as the man claiming to be Martin, while Baye is soft and gentle as Bertrand in the second of seven films they have made together. The Return of Martin Guerre might be set nearly half a millennium ago, but its exploration of faith, honor, virtue, poverty, the law, education, and truth, as well as how people can change over time — or not — is not as old-fashioned as it might at first seem in this age of fake news, income inequality, religious extremism, and social media.

TWENTIETH-ANNIVERSARY RESTORATION: AUDITION

Model Eihi Shiina makes a stunning debut in Takashi Miike’s Audition

AUDITION (ÔDISHON) (Takashi Miike, 1999)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Opens July 3
212-660-0312
metrograph.com

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.

Yoshikawa Yasuhisa (Jun Kunimura) and Aoyama Shigeharu (Ryo Ishibashi) get more than they bargained for in Audition

Written by Daisuke Tengan based on the novel by Ryu Murakami, Audition begins like a Japanese family melodrama. The gentle-hearted Aoyama Shigeharu (Ryo Ishibashi) watches his wife, Ryoko (Miyuki Matsuda), die in a hospital, leaving him to raise their young son, Shigehiko. Seven years later, the teenage Shigehiko (Tetsu Sawaki) thinks it’s time for his father to find a new wife, as does Aoyama’s best friend, filmmaker Yoshikawa Yasuhisa (Jun Kunimura). Yoshikawa and Aoyama decide to hold fake auditions so the lonely widower can find just the right new romantic partner. He is immediately drawn to the younger, damaged Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina in her stunning film debut), a suicidal former ballerina with a sketchy past filled with questions that worry Yoshikawa. But Aoyama starts dating her anyway, and what starts out sweetly ends up something entirely different as he meets a onetime music executive (Ren Osugi) and an old dance teacher (Renji Ishibashi) who — well, you’ll just have to see that for yourself. The last half hour is so brutal, so grotesque, so disturbing, so violent that you should hang on only at your own risk as it travels “deeper, deeper, deeper” into the psyche, among other things.

There’s something not quite right with Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina) in Takashi Miike’s Audition

Intimately photographed by Hideo Yamamoto and featuring an ominous score by Kōji Endō, Audition has lost none of its power to thrill and chill, right down to the bone. The film has always raised issues of misogyny and male guilt, but, viewed in 2019, those elements come to the fore. The scene in which Yoshikawa and Aoyama interview numerous women contains more than a few cringeworthy stereotypes, and the flashbacks of the abuse suffered by Asami as a child feel more manipulative in 2019. Essentially, Audition is a film that could spring only from a male brain. That said, it is still terrifying twenty years later. Miike (Ichii the Killer, The Happiness of the Katakuris), who has directed nearly a hundred films in his three-decade career, from Westerns and yakuza movies to children’s fare and superhero flicks, is best known for the graphic violence in his films, but he also has a wild sense of humor and a knack for making audiences think, “Oh no he won’t,” and then he does. And it’s Audition that cemented that well-earned reputation.

GRIT AND GLITTER — BEFORE AND AFTER STONEWALL: MULTIPLE MANIACS / TROPICAL MALADY

Divine is the star of “Cavalcade of Perversions” in John Waters’s splendidly lurid Multiple Maniacs

MULTIPLE MANIACS (John Waters, 1970),
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Friday, June 28, 7:00
Series continues through July 6
718-777-6888
www.movingimage.us

In conjunction with the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riot, the Museum of the Moving Image is presenting “Grit and Glitter: Before and After Stonewall,” a thirteen-film series guest curated by Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri (October Country, Peace in the Valley) consisting of queer-cinema works that have inspired them. The seventeen-day festival began with such films as Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema and continues June 28 with one of John Waters’s craziest early works, when the King of Bad Taste, serving as writer, director, producer, cinematographer, and editor, was only twenty-three. The extremely low budget romp Multiple Maniacs begins with barker Mr. David (David Lochary) inviting people into Lady Divine’s Cavalcade of Perversions, proclaiming, “This is the show you want. . . . the sleaziest show on earth. Not actors, not paid imposters, but real, actual filth who have been carefully screened in order to present to you the most flagrant violation of natural law known to man.” Of course, that is an ideal introduction to the cinematic world of Waters, one dominated by the celebration of sexual proclivities, fetish, salaciousness, indecency, violence, and marginalized weirdos living on the fringes of society. Lady Divine, played by Divine, turns out to be a cheat, the freak show just a set-up for a robbery. Soon Divine is jealous of David’s relationship with Bonnie (Mary Vivian Pearce), hanging out with her topless daughter, Cookie (Cookie Mueller), and being led into a church by the Infant of Prague (Michael Renner Jr.), where she’s brought to sexual ecstasy by Mink (Mink Stole). There’s also rape, murder, Jesus (George Figgs), the Virgin Mary (Edith Massey), and the famed Lobstura. Shot in lurid black-and-white, Multiple Maniacs is a divine freak show all its own, an underground classic that redefined just what a movie could be, a crude, disturbing tale that you can’t turn away from.

“The outrageously subversive Multiple Maniacs could easily be mistaken as mere freak show sentiment and gross-out comedy, but at heart it’s a defiantly angry rejection of all things mainstream,” Palmieri explains in a program note. “Shot in the summer of Stonewall in Baltimore in 1969 and released in 1970, the film begins with Mr. David installed on a quiet wooded suburban street luring unsuspecting passersby to dare to attend Lady Divine’s Cavalcade of Perversion, in which all hell breaks loose. The audience is made complicit in this transgression, and appropriately assaulted for it for the rest of the production. As punk and queer as film gets.”

Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady was both booed and celebrated at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival

TROPICAL MALADY (SUD PRALAD) (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, June 29, 7:00, and Sunday, June 30, 2:00
Series continues through July 6
718-777-6888
www.movingimage.us

“Grit and Glitter: Before and After Stonewall” takes quite a turn from Multiple Maniacs with Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady, a beautiful, mystical work that won the Jury Prize at Cannes and will thoroughly engage you — if you allow it to. Part tender love story between a country boy (Banlop Lomnoi) and a soldier (Dakda Kaewbuadee), part folktale set in the deep forests of Thailand, Tropical Malady is like a visual poem in which details are not as important as the overall effect, which is intoxicating. The unorthodox film features ghosts, a shape-shifter, unusual characters, and a playful sense of humor that come together to form a subtle meditation on life and love. Weerasethakul once again displays the gentle, captivating narrative technique that lies at the heart of his oeuvre, which also includes such works as Blissfully Yours, Syndromes and a Century, and 2010 Palme d’Or winner Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Own Lives. Some people at Cannes walked out on Tropical Malady and others stuck around to boo it; Quentin Tarantino headed the group that awarded it the Jury Prize regardless. You can decide to cheer or boo, or merely just experience it, when it screens on June 29 and 30 at the Museum of the Moving Image.

“Blissfully beyond categorization, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s breathtaking Tropical Malady is a sui generis romance told in two parts: a gentle courtship between two men that transforms into a mind-altering tale of a soldier stalked by a shaman in the form of a tiger,” Palmieri writes. “Mysterious on just about every level possible, Apichatpong explores the complicated nuances of desire through this magical and haunting parable, where playful evasiveness eventually gives way to total surrender. Come for the love story, stay for the talking monkey.”

The series runs through July 6 with such other films as Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, Stephen Frears’s My Beautiful Laundrette, and Pietro Marcello’s The Mouth of the Wolf. “Being a rural gay kid, my source of queer presence and history mostly came from viewing media stereotypes and news reports about AIDS — save for the rare films that were illuminated windows into a queer world happening, waiting, and calling from the other side,” Mosher notes. “Since then I’ve spent my life seeking and, hopefully, on occasion, creating such illuminated moments. We now live in a time when LGBTQ+ representation is so mainstream that the Stonewall riot can be rewritten as a triumph of whiteness and the life of Freddie Mercury can be retooled to support normative family values. To me, though, the films in this program shine with a disruptive, beacon-like power. Some are celebratory, some problematic. Some are highly crafted, some crudely made. Some are all of these things, which is why the light they radiate is not a single reductive beam but a necessary iridescence — multifaceted, shifting, reflecting the visions of both vast communities and the single, lonely viewer in the dark.”

Palmieri adds, “With this series, we’re interested in the films and filmmakers whose ideas reflected the cultural shifts bubbling under the surface that led to Stonewall, as well as the effect it had on the cinema and culture that followed. In these films you’ll find a multitude of approaches, even contradictions, but they all share a subversiveness, a strain of rage, a rejection of social and cinematic norms, and a deep well of empathy. These films are clarion calls to me as a filmmaker, and they serve as a constant reminder that rage and empathy can coexist, and that they are powerful tools to work with.”

BEFORE STONEWALL: THE MAKING OF A GAY AND LESBIAN COMMUNITY

Documentary follows the beginnings of the gay liberation movement leading up to Stonewall

BEFORE STONEWALL: THE MAKING OF A GAY AND LESBIAN COMMUNITY (Greta Schiller, 1984)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, June 21
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com

“Unless otherwise stated, the people who appear in this film should not be presumed to be homosexual . . . or heterosexual,” it says at the beginning of Before Stonewall, the 1984 documentary that has been restored for the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Executive producer John Scagliotti, director Greta Schiller, and codirector Robert Rosenberg go back in time to show the evolution of gay liberation that led up to the events of June 28 to July 1, 1969. Narrated by Rubyfruit Jungle author Rita Mae Brown, the film combines new interviews with archival footage of silent movies, personal photographs, songs, intimate recollections, and poignant anecdotes, both painful and funny. “Homosexuality has always been a dirty word,” says artist and writer Richard Bruce Nugent. “I cannot remember, in my seventy-some years, a time when it wasn’t a dirty word. But on the other hand, homosexuality, the practice of it, was not a dirty thing.”

Writer and former dancer Harry Otis, retired bookkeeper Donna Smith, activist and Mattachine Society cofounder Harry Hay, domestic worker and dancer Mabel Hampton, newspaper reporter and WWII army chaplain George Buse, priest Grant Gallup, entertainer Carroll Davis, journalist and archivist Jim Kepner, US government scientist Frank Kameny, poet Allen Ginsberg, and historian and playwright Martin Duberman are among those who share stories about discrimination they experienced and how they fought to maintain their identity. WAC soldier Nell “Johnnie” Phelps’s anecdote about General Dwight D. Eisenhower is one of the best Ike tales you’ll ever hear.

The film looks at censorship, secret parties, all-gay theater, the Hays Code, homosexuality in the military, drag queens, Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s HUAC hearings, same-sex marriage, gay publications, and Black Power as the desire for freedom for gays and lesbians builds, leading to the Stonewall rebellion. “In the sixties, there was a distinct change in the temper and the tempo of the gay movement, partly as a result of the black civil rights militancy,” activist Barbara Gittings says. “We began to get more militant in the gay movement. We began to see that the problem of homosexuality is not really gay people’s problem. It’s a problem of the social attitudes of the people around us, and we had to change their attitudes, and that in turn would help us with our self-image.” Despite how far they’ve come, however, gays and lesbians still have a long way to go in an America that has still not fully accepted them. Before Stonewall opens June 21 at the Quad, with Q&As with Schiller, Rosenberg, and research director Andrea Weiss on June 21 at 6:30, with Rosenberg on June 222 at 7:05, and with Schiller, Weiss, production manager Amy Chen, historical consultant Blanche Wiesen Cook, and Lesli Klainberg on June 23 at 2:50, moderated by Tracy Daniels.

ENDZEIT (EVER AFTER)

Vivi (Gro Swantje Kohlhof) and Eva (Maja Lehrer) hide from hungry zombies in Endzeit

ENDZEIT (EVER AFTER) (Carolina Hellsgård, 2018)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, June 21
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
endzeiteverafter.com

Swedish-born, Berlin-based Carolina Hellsgård follows her 2015 debut, Wanja, with Endzeit — Ever After, a gripping feminist gothic zombie movie. In a postapocalyptic world, flesh-eating zombies wander hungrily through the land, looking for living souls to consume. Twenty-two-year-old Vivi (Gro Swantje Kohlhof), haunted by the memory of leaving behind her beloved younger sister, Renata (Amy Schuk), and determined to find her, arrives at a fenced-in outpost that is one of only two places where humans have survived. It is run by the warden (Barbara Philipp), who keeps a tight grip on the rules to keep everyone alive. After a zombie attacks, the meek Vivi is soon on the run with tough-as-nails twenty-six-year-old Eva (Maja Lehrer) as they attempt to make it through the Black Forest to the town of Jena. But without much food and water and with zombies liable to jump out at them at any moment, safety is a long way away.

Eva (Maja Lehrer) faces a gardener (Trine Dyrholm) as Vivi (Gro Swantje Kohlhof) looks on in Endzeit

Endzeit is a dystopian tale by and about women: The screenplay was written by Olivia Vieweg, based on her graphic novel; Leah Striker’s cinematography is lush and beautiful; Julia Oehring and Ruth Schönegge serve as editors; Jenny Roesler did the sets; Teresa Grosser designed the costumes, highlighted by a white wedding dress; Franziska Henke composed the eerie score; and the film was produced by Claudia Schröter and executive produced by Ingelore König. Men are inconsequential in this hellish future, where Mother Nature is in charge. There might be a lot of blood and gore and fear, but the land is in full bloom, with gorgeous green fields, healthy, flourishing plants and trees, and warm sunshine. At one point Vivi encounters a gardener (Trine Dyrholm) who appears to be part of the earth itself. Hellsgård and Vieweg have created a different kind of zombie flick, where the protagonists face their individual guilt as they search for freedom in a dangerous landscape bursting with life. It also demonstrates the failure of fences to do only one job — keeping others out. Endzeit opens June 21 at IFC, with Hellsgård participating in Q&As following the 7:45 shows on June 21 and 22.

A BIGGER SPLASH

David Hockney works on his masterpiece in Jack Hazan’s A Bigger Splash

A BIGGER SPLASH (Jack Hazan, 1974)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Opens Friday, June 21
212-660-0312
metrograph.com

Just in time to coincide with Pride celebrations throughout New York City in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots, Metrograph is premiering 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. This past November, 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-two next month, 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 is scheduled to have a major drawing show at the National Portrait Gallery next year. In addition, Catherine Cusset’s novel, Life of David Hockney, was just published in English, a fictionalized tale that conceptionally recalls A Bigger Splash, which opens June 21 at Metrograph, with various Q&As and introductions by Hazan, Richard Haines and Alexander Olch, Nick McCarthy, Ryan McNamara, Matt Wolf, and Cusset from June 21 to 30. And if you can’t get enough of Hockney, Anita Rogers is showing “Films by James Scott, Etchings by David Hockney” through July 27, consisting of Hockney’s 1966 series “Illustrations for Fourteen Poems from C. P. Cavafy” and Scott’s 1966 documentary short about the series, Love’s Presentation.

TONI MORRISON: THE PIECES I AM

Toni Morrison discusses her life and career in The Pieces I Am (photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders)

TONI MORRISON: THE PIECES I AM (Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, 2019)
Film Forum, 209 West Houston St., 212-727-8110
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Francesca Beale Theater, 144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves., 212-875-5050
Opens Friday, June 21
www.tonimorrisonfilm.com

At the beginning of Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, artist Mickalene Thomas’s hands are seen putting together a collage of different images of author Toni Morrison, like a jigsaw puzzle, one on top of the other, to the sounds of Kathryn Bostic’s score. It’s a beautiful start to a beautiful film that takes viewers deep inside Morrison’s life and career, from daughter and student to teacher, wife, mother, editor, and award-winning novelist. “She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order,” Morrison writes in Beloved. In the film, Greenfield-Sanders, Morrison’s longtime friend and primary photographer of nearly forty years, and editor and researcher Johanna Giebelhaus gather the pieces that help paint a portrait of the extraordinary person that is Toni Morrison.

Toni Morrison and Timothy Greenfield-Sanders collaborate on new documentary (photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders)

They incorporate old interviews with Charlie Rose, Dick Cavett, and Bill Moyers, personal photographs, archival footage, and new interviews with Morrison and thirteen of her colleagues — among them Columbia University professor Farah Griffin, activist Angela Davis, New Yorker critic Hilton Als, Random House editor Robert Gottlieb, composer Richard Danielpour, media magnate Oprah Winfrey, and fellow authors Paula Giddings, Russell Banks, Fran Lebowitz, and Walter Mosley — who have nothing but laudatory things to say about her, as both a writer and a human being. The film also includes excerpts from several of Morrison’s books, read by Kim Cattrall, Joel Grey, S. Epatha Merkerson, Whoopi Goldberg, and others, in addition to works by such black artists as Kara Walker, Martin Puryear, Titus Kaphar, Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, David Hammons, Faith Ringgold, Romare Bearden, and Hank Willis Thomas that subtly complement her words.

The main focus, however, is on Morrison’s status as a black woman writer and her white audience. Early in her career, she was criticized for writing only about blacks and the black experience. “The assumption is the reader is a white person, and that troubled me. They were never talking to me,” Morrison says. “I didn’t want to speak for black people; I wanted to speak to, and to be among . . . us. So the first thing I had to do was to eliminate the white gaze.” One white gaze she has not eliminated is that of Greenfield-Sanders, who is Caucasian; in fact, Morrison is the one who inspired him to make such films as The Black List, The Latino List, The Women’s List, and The Trans List, which document people from diverse communities. (Morrison contributed an introduction to The Women’s List.)

Greenfield-Sanders focuses on such Morrison novels as Sula, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, and Beloved as well as the nonfiction compendium The Black Book. Cinematographer Graham Willoughby purposely shoots Morrison, who turned eighty-eight in February, straight on, with her looking directly into the camera, while the other subjects are photographed from the side, over the shoulder, adding further prestige and prominence to the grand dame, who is also shot on lovely mornings, working at her riverfront home.

Toni Morrison is seen hard at work in her riverfront home in The Pieces I Am (photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders)

Perhaps the best thing about this two-hour American Masters production is that after watching and listening to this remarkable woman talk about her approach to writing and the world at large, you’ll want to rush to reread her books, or pick them up for the first time. “Words have power,” she explains. Indeed they do. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am opens June 21 at Film Forum and Lincoln Center; Greenfield-Sanders will participate in Q&As following the 7:20 show on June 21, the 12:20 show on June 22 (with Brigid Hughes), and the 2:40 show on June 23 at Film Forum and after the 3:30 and 6:20 shows on June 22 and the 1:00 show on June 23 at Lincoln Center.