this week in film and television

REICH RICHTER PÄRT

A flash mob sings Arvo Pärt’s “Drei Hirtenkinder aus Fátima” in room of Gerhard Richter wallpaper and tapestries (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The Shed
Level 2 Gallery in the Bloomberg Building
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 2, four times daily, $25
646-455-3494
theshed.org

The Shed, the new performance space at Hudson Yards, has made a rather inauspicious debut. The experimental play Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, inaugurating the five-hundred-seat black-box Griffin Theater, is a critical and popular flop, with bad reviews, walkouts, and lots of empty seats. The first art installation, an untitled work by Trisha Donnelly, initially cost ten dollars but was made free after a less-than-enthusiastic reaction to the exhibit, which consists of trees on gurneys in a dark room where Leontyne Price’s rendition of “Habanera” from Carmen repeats over and over. But the immersive Reich Richter Pärt is a bit more on track, though it too has its drawbacks. “We’re only getting started,” artistic director Alex Poots told me after a recent performance; Poots previously did wonderful things at the Manchester Festival and Park Ave. Armory.

Curated by senior program advisor Hans Ulrich Obrist and Poots, Reich Richter Pärt is a two-room, fifty-minute multidisciplinary collaboration between eighty-two-year-old American composer Steve Reich, eighty-seven-year-old German visual artist Gerhard Richter, and eighty-three-year-old Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. The audience is first let into an expansive white space with high ceilings; the walls feature vertical wallpaper and jacquard woven tapestries that emulate Rorschach-like strips that are supposed to resemble stained glass, as if the room is a cathedral. Visitors are given too much time to walk around and look at the images; many break off into conversations and take out their cell phones until a group of men and women starts singing, a flash mob performing Pärt’s lovely choral work “Drei Hirtenkinder aus Fátima,” about three Portuguese shepherd children who claimed to see an apparition of the Virgin Mary in 1917. The choral work, which is dedicated to Richter and was inspired by Psalms 8.2 (“From the mouths of children and infants you create praise for yourself”), is performed by either the Choir of Trinity Wall Street Performing Ensemble or Brooklyn Youth Chorus.

Gerhard Richter and Corinna Belz’s abstract film screens with live score by Steve Reich (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The crowd is then led into a second large room, where people can grab folding chairs and sit wherever they like in the empty space between a wall on one side with a screen and a small orchestra on the other, either the Ensemble Signal or the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), depending on the date. (I saw the former, conducted by Brad Lubman. Poots suggested sitting very close to the musicians for the optimal experience, so I joined such visitors as Marina Abramovic and Francis Ford Coppola.) The orchestra plays Reich’s newly commissioned score, created specifically for an approximately half-hour film by Richter and Corinna Belz, which brings to life Richter’s algorithmic processing of his 2016 abstract painting Abstraktes Bild (946-3), using a computer to fold it in half and half again, dividing it into 1/4096ths and then proceeding in the other direction, creating a hypnotic, kaleidoscopic animation in which the painting morphs from bands of bold color, which also line two walls, into yet more Rorschach-like shapes and figures slowly marching across the screen until it all double back to the color strips. (The original work is on view as well.) The film follows the principles Richter employed in his “Patterns” series, which Reich adapted for his thrilling score. As with the first part of the presentation, the second goes on too long, but it’s still a wonder to behold, an example of the kind of fascinating promise the Shed holds.

WALKING ON WATER

Christo takes a spin around his massive project in Andrey M Paounov’s Walking on Water

WALKING ON WATER (Andrey M Paounov, 2018)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, May 17
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

Andrey M Paounov’s Walking on Water, opening this weekend at Film Forum, reveals a lot about large-scale installation artist Christo, and you can find out even more when the Bulgarian-born eighty-four-year-old curmudgeonly religious icon / rock star participates in Q&As with Paounov on Friday and Saturday at 7:00 and Sunday at 4:45. In 1961, Christo and his wife and artistic partner, Jeanne-Claude, started creating massive public works, wrapping fabric around the entire Reichstag in Berlin, placing hundreds of yellow umbrellas in Tokyo and blue umbrellas in California concurrently, and lining the pathways of Central Park with dozens of saffron-colored gates, among other impressive spectacles that gave a pop art sheen to land art, which had been the preserve of Robert Smithson, James Turrell, and Walter De Maria, among others. In 1969, Christo and Jeanne-Claude began trying to realize The Floating Piers project, an expansive walkway that would make visitors feel like they were strolling on the water itself. Jeanne-Claude passed away in 2009, and five years later Christo became determined to make The Floating Piers a reality.

The film follows him as he finds his location — Lake Iseo in Northern Italy — adamantly chooses his materials, meets with local politicians, and has something to say about each step of the process, giving Paounov near-total access as Christo experiences bumps and bruises and gets his eyelashes trimmed. He argues with his nephew and right-hand man, Vladimir Yavachev, over numerous details; gets frustrated with computers; complains about the cover of a catalog (“This is horror story,” he says); is thwarted by bad weather; and nearly has a meltdown when crowd control gets out of hand. He approaches everything with the exacting eye of an artist, taking in the beauty of nature while seeking perfection, and nothing less, from the large crew working for him.

Christo is worshipped everywhere he goes; not only does his name evoke Jesus’s but so does the purpose of The Floating Piers, inviting men, women, and children to traverse the lake on foot similarly to what Jesus did on the Sea of Galilee. Christo even has long (white) hair that flaps in the wind. His eyes light up when he visits the Vatican and marvels at Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling and when he takes a helicopter ride to survey the installation, providing filmgoers with breathtaking views. There is also a terrific score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans that ranges from sweet and gentle to percussive and pulsating. As ornery as Christo seems to be, he smiles when he needs to, like when he stops by a party loaded with rich collectors, is stopped by fans for selfies, or gazes lovingly at the rich natural landscape surrounding Lake Iseo; it’s all part of his genius.

Paounov (Georgi and the Butterflies, The Mosquito Problem and Other Stories) put the film together with seven hundred hours of footage that had already been recorded before he was hired in 2016, adding to that what he then shot, wisely eschewing talking heads and interviews and instead presenting Christo and his captivating world uncensored and unfiltered, which is a real treat. “Art is not a profession. You don’t work from nine to five,” Christo tells a classroom of small children in his broken English. “To be artist, you are all the time artist. There is no moment when you are not artist.” Walking on Water is an intimate fly-on-the-wall documentary about the creative process and one man’s intense determination to make the planet a better place, one work of art at a time.

DELANYMANIA

Samuel R. Delany will be at Metrograph for a pair of special programs

Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
May 17-19
212-660-0312
metrograph.com
www.samueldelany.com

In Fred Barney Taylor’s 2009 documentary The Polymath, about writer, filmmaker, and social historian Samuel R. “Chip” Delany, Jonathan Lethem explains, “He embraces the whole of intellectual curiosity while remaining committed to an artistic practice. He’s a philosophical, confessional, and fictional genius. How often is this encountered in American literature? I don’t know that there’s any precedent. Geniuses are usually monomaniacs; they do one thing to the utmost. Well, Chip does several things to the utmost.” Metrograph is honoring the seventy-seven-year-old Delany’s life and career with the three-day series “Delanymania,” featuring films by and about him or that made an impact on him. “They’re films I liked early, and they contributed to my own appreciation of science fiction, films, and writing (This Island Earth), and an appreciation of the cost of difference (The Boy with Green Hair, Touch of Evil), and what I wanted to do with the movement of bodies in The Orchid (Gold Diggers of 1937, The Seventh Seal),” he notes about the program. Delany, a New York City native and the author of such science-fiction tomes as Dhalgren and Babel-17, will be at Metrograph for several screenings, introducing shows and participating in Q&As for The Polymath with Taylor on May 17 at 6:00 and for “3 Films by Samuel R. Delany” on May 18 at 3:30. The latter consists of his only film as a director, the controversial 1971 experimental work The Orchid, and two extremely low-budget DIY shorts by his then-partner, Frank Romeo, Bye, Bye Love and The Aunts.

Metrograph will show Samuel R. Delany’s only film as a director, The Orchid

The Orchid is Delany’s Un Chien Andalou, a bizarre, surreal, delightfully amateurish tale of a businessman with a thing for protractors and other basic mathematical equipment who has strange encounters on the streets of New York City with a little boy, a man carrying a microphone, and members of a cultlike group than don bizarre masks, take off their clothes, and take part in odd rituals. Produced by Barbara Wise, the film features a playful score by John Herbert McDowell; Adolfas Mekas, brother of Jonas, was the production coordinator. Writing as K. Leslie Steiner, Delany opined that when the film “primiered [sic] at the World Science Fiction Convention in Chicago that September (Delany himself was not present), it caused a riot. Outraged fans tried to shout the film off and even pulled down the screen.” Chip Delany is credited as script boy for Bye, Bye Love, in which two brothers (Frank De Fay and Martin Zone) from upstate head to the Big Apple to become famous by recording their version of the Everly Brothers classic “Bye Bye Love,” and The Aunts, in which a group of women (Cass Morgan, Katie McDonough, Mayda Sharrow, and Pat Tortorici) gossip away in a small kitchen as a young girl (Jocelyn Mason) listens in from her bedroom. Delany’s father was an undertaker and his mother was a library clerk, which explains a lot. In conjunction with “Delanymania” and other cinematic literary events, Metrograph is hosting a Spring Film Book Fair on May 18 and 19 from 11:00 to 6:00, promising “thousands of rare, vintage, and out of print items, including biographies, monographs, hundreds of periodicals, plus memorabilia, scripts, novelizations, and other extraordinary pieces of ephemera.”

JEAN-CLAUDE CARRIÈRE: YOYO / HEREUX ANNIVERSAIRE

All the wealth in the world can’t make a lonely millionaire (Pierre Étaix) happy in Yoyo

YOYO (Pierre Étaix, 1965) / HEREUX ANNIVERSAIRE (Pierre Étaix & Jean-Claude Carrière, 1962)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Thursday, May 9, 4:30, and Wednesday, May 15, 7:00
Series runs May 9 – June 16
www.moma.org

French auteur Pierre Étaix’s strange and beautiful films were long inaccessible, the subject of nearly two decades of legal wrangling, but on May 9 and 15, MoMA will be presenting his 1965 bittersweet black-and-white slapstick charmer, Yoyo, as part of its “Jean-Claude Carrière” series, celebrating the screenwriter and master collaborator who worked with such legends as Luis Buñuel, Louis Malle, Miloš Forman, Jean-Luc Godard, Andrzej Wajda, Nagisa Oshima, and Peter Brook; the eighty-seven-year-old Carrière will introduce the May 9 screening. (In April 2010, Étaix was finally able to once again bring his films to the public, his entire output restored and making their New York debut at a festival at Film Forum in October 2012.) Étaix, who wrote Yoyo with Carrière, stars as a ridiculously wealthy but extremely bored man who lives alone in an ornately decorated, absurdly large chateau. It’s 1925, and he has servants for absolutely everything, as well as his own private band and flappers, but he pines for his lost love, Isolina (Claudine Auger). One day she arrives with a traveling circus, along with a young boy (Philippe Dionnet) who turns out to be his son. She at first rejects the multimillionaire, but when he loses it all on Black Tuesday, the three of them form their own traveling circus, with the boy ultimately turning into a popular clown named Yoyo (played as an adult by Étaix) and seeking to restore the chateau and his family.

French auteur Pierre Étaix takes clowning around very seriously in rediscovered classic

The first section of the film is a glorious homage to the silent film era and other cinematic comedians, with Étaix evoking his mentor, Jacques Tati; Charlie Chaplin; Buster Keaton; and, later, Jerry Lewis, with whom he’d appear as Gustav the Great in Lewis’s never-to-be-seen Holocaust film The Day the Clown Died. Nouvelle Vague cinematographer Jean Boffety (An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge; Je t’aime, je t’aime) shoots Yoyo in a sharp, gorgeous black-and-white, composing breathtaking shots that boast a dazzling symmetry that must make Wes Anderson giddy with delight, while Étaix fills the film with ingenious sight gags that would make Ernie Kovacs proud (just wait till you see the supposed still-life painting), all anchored by Jean Paillaud’s memorable musical theme. But once the stock market crashes and talkies take over, dialogue enters the picture, and the camera is often off balance, the perfect symmetry a thing of the past. With Yoyo, Étaix, who had previously made Le Soupirant and would go on to make The Great Love and En pleine forme, was influenced by the sudden, tragic death of his father, his love of the circus — he had already worked under the big tent, and he would leave films to become a clown in a traveling circus in the early 1970s — and his viewing of Fellini’s 8½ (look for the La Strada poster) resulting in a film that sometimes gets a little lost and too surreal, but he ultimately brings things back around as Yoyo grows into a star and the story travels through the arc of twentieth-century entertainment, from the silent era to talkies to television. Truffaut called it “a beautiful film in which I loved every shot and every idea, and which taught me many things about movies.”

Pierre Étaix and Jean-Claude Carrière’s Heureux Anniversaire kicks off Carrière festival at MoMA with Yoyo

It’s a real treat that Étaix’s work is undergoing this rediscovery; lovers of Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist will particularly enjoy Yoyo, which is being shown with Heureux Anniversaire, Étaix and Carrière’s deliriously funny black-and-white short that won the 1963 Oscar for Best Live Action Short Subject. As a woman (Laurence Lignières) prepares a special anniversary dinner at home, her husband (Étaix) gets trapped in all kinds of craziness as he desperately tries to make it home in time, but the traffic and parking gods are against him. Hysterical slapstick ensues virtually without dialogue, like a classic silent film with a wacky score. And you’ll never be able to look at Mr. Bean the same way again. “Jean-Claude Carrière” runs May 9 to June 16 and includes such other works Carrière wrote and/or directed as Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Godard’s Every Man for Himself, Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty, and Wajda’s Danton, with Carrière introducing several screenings.

TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION: 17 BLOCKS

A Washington family deals with pain and tragedy in the shadow of the US Capitol in 17 Blocks

17 BLOCKS (Davy Rothbart, 2019)
Tribeca Film Festival
Regal Cinemas Battery Park 11-1
102 North End Ave.
Saturday, May 4, 12 noon
www.tribecafilm.com

Davy Rothbart follows a Washington, DC, family trying to break the cycle of drugs, gun violence, and poverty over twenty years in 17 Blocks, a powerful documentary making its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it won Best Editing in a Documentary Film. “The award for best editing goes to a film for its profound treatment of vast amounts of honest, often raw footage. The film is structured in a way that renders some of the most affecting moments with great subtlety. Viewers are transformed over the course of the film, a testament to the choices made in its making,” the jury said in its official announcement. Written, produced, and directed by Rothbart and written and edited by Jennifer Tiexiera, 17 Blocks features footage shot in 1999, 2009, and more recently, much of it taken by members of the Sanford family, including Cheryl Sanford, her sons Emmanuel Durant Jr. and Akil “Smurf” Sanford, and her daughter Denice Sanford-Durant, in addition to Rothbart and cinematographer Zachary Shields. Rothbart became friends with fifteen-year-old Smurf in 1999 and taught nine-year-old Emmanuel how to use a video camera, so the family was comfortable sharing intimate, deeply personal details of their lives over the years.

The Sanfords grew up just seventeen blocks from the US Capitol, but their experiences are all-too-representative of the country’s most vulnerable communities, which are ignored or misunderstood by the government. In 1999, nine-year-old Emmanuel has dreams of a bright future as Smurf starts getting involved with drugs. In 2009, Emmanuel wants to be a firefighter and marry his high school sweetheart, Carmen Payne; Denice is a single mother; and Smurf is living a dangerous life. Tragedy strikes, and two decades later the repercussions are still being felt in a big way. “I believe in hope,” Cheryl, one of the film’s producers, says despite all that happens to them. They don’t blame society as they try to understand and accept their own responsibilities for what has transpired and vow to get on with their lives, but opportunity is limited.

The film is seen primarily through Cheryl’s eyes; another tragedy is how she went from a smart kid going to private school to a drug addict who cannot stop a sad downward spiral. In his director’s statement, Rothbart, who considers himself to be an “adopted” Sanford, notes that after the tragedy, Cheryl came to him and said, “Where is your video camera? So many people are killed by guns in our neighborhood, but none have had their entire lives documented as thoroughly as my family.” It’s a brave decision to open up as much as they do. There are two key moments in the film that will stay with viewers for a long time. At one point, family members visit a shop that specializes in making T-shirts with the images of young people who were murdered on them, which are worn at funerals. And the closing credits begin with a list of all the DC homicide victims since the Sanford tragedy in 2009, with screen after screen showing hundreds of names. 17 Blocks is screening on May 4 at noon at Regal Cinemas Battery Park, with journalist and author Rothbart (This American Life, Medora) on hand to discuss the film and the nonprofit he started, Washington to Washington, an annual hiking adventure for DC kids to show them more of what the world has to offer.

TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL THIS USED TO BE NEW YORK: OTHER MUSIC

Documentary goes behind the scenes of one of New York City’s most beloved record stores

OTHER MUSIC (Puloma Basu & Rob Hatch-Miller, 2019)
Village East Cinema
181-189 Second Ave. at 12th St.
Sunday, May 5, 8:45
www.tribecafilm.com
www.othermusicdocumentary.com

It’s a shame that Puloma Basu and Rob Hatch-Miller’s new documentary, Other Music, is part of the Tribeca Film Festival section “This Used to Be New York,” because that means that their subject, the much-loved Other Music independent record store, is a “Used to Be,” no longer part of the city’s landscape. From 1995 to 2016, Other Music was an oasis for music lovers and musicians of all types, an escape from the mainstream; in fact, when the shop first opened, a giant Tower Records chain store was across the street, but OM thrived because it offered so much that was different. “Other Music was the quintessential place in New York City for people that appreciated music. It just was a place where you were able to search out things you had never heard of,” JD Samson of Le Tigre says in the film.

Basu and Hatch-Miller (Syl Johnson: Any Way the Wind Blows) not only focus on customers and performers but also on the devoted, fanatical OM staff that formed a kind of family, including Dave, Nicole, Clay, Amanda, Duane, Katie, Daniel, Jo Ann, Michael, Maris, Karen, Jenny, Geoff, and Stephanie, led by owners and cofounders Josh Madell and Chris Vanderloo. (Third cofounder Jeff Gibson did not participate in the film but is seen in old clips.) “People who just listen to records all day deserve to have a job where they can do that. People who work in record shops are always weirdos. Weirdos need jobs,” Stuart Braithwaite of Mogwai jokes. Longtime employee Kris, noting that live shows weren’t enough for him when he first came to New York, explains why he worked at OM: “I wanted to be bombarded constantly. I wanted to have my ideas challenged, and I wanted to be fucked with.”

The documentary follows the store’s countdown to its closing on June 25, 2016, as customers come by to chat and buy records there for the last time and current and former employees share memories about their time at the shop, discussing OM’s unique categorization of music, the handwritten cards for recommended records, the confounding Decadanse section, the local musical response to 9/11, and their online business and epically detailed newsletters (which we at twi-ny relied on heavily). Josh’s wife, Dawn, and Chris’s wife, Lydia, add their thoughts on the impact the store’s two-decade run had on their lives. There are lots of old photos and archival footage, including snippets of in-store live appearances by Mogwai, Interpol, Yo La Tengo, Neutral Milk Hotel, No Age, the Go-Betweens, and cult favorite Gary Wilson; high praise from Meet Me in the Bathroom author Lizzie Goodman, Daniel Kessler of Interpol, Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend, Matt Berninger of the National, Dean Wareham of Luna and Galaxie 500, Brian Chase of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Regina Spektor, Jason Schwartzman, and former store employee Dave Portner of Animal Collective; a celebration of onetime OM staffer Beans of Antipop Consortium; and others who will make you regret either never having gone there or not having gone — or bought — enough. “It’s kind of like a religious experience,” Benicio del Toro says. Other Music has one more screening remaining at the Tribeca Film Festival, on May 5 at 8:45.

FIRST SATURDAYS: CELEBRATE SPRING

Liz Johnson Artur (born Bulgaria, 1964). Josephine, Peckham, 1995. Chromogenic photograph, 20 x 24 in. (50.8 x 60.9 cm). Courtesy of the artist. © Liz Johnson Artur

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, May 4, free (some events require advance tickets), 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

Spring is in the air at the May edition of the free First Saturdays program at the Brooklyn Museum. There will be live performances by Descarrilao, Arooj Aftab, the Fadara Group (True to Our Native Land, featuring Chief Ayanda Clarke), and Kaleta & Super Yamba Band; an artist and curator talk on “Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall” with Park McArthur, Constantina Zavitsanos, and Allie Rickard; a hands-on workshop in which participants can make print design artwork inspired by several current exhibitions; a screening of the fifteen-minute short Dreams from the Deep End (Modupeola Fadugba, 2018), followed by a discussion with Fadugba, Kristen Windmuller-Luna, and swim team members; an artist and curator tour of “Liz Johnson Artur: Dusha” with Liz Johnson Artur and Drew Sawyer; and teen gallery talks on “One: Egúngún.” In addition, the galleries will be open late so you can check out “Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving,” “Nobody Promised You Tomorrow: Art 50 Years After Stonewall,” “Eric N. Mack: Lemme walk across the room,” “One: Do Ho Suh,” “One: Egúngún,” “Something to Say: Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine, Deborah Kass, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Hank Willis Thomas,” “Infinite Blue,” “A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt,” “Kwang Young Chun: Aggregations,” and more.