this week in lectures, signings, panel discussions, workshops, and Q&As

WINTER 2020 PERFORMANCE FESTIVALS

Sophia Petrides’s BREATHING WITH THE ROOM is part of New Ear Festival

Once upon a time, January was considered a relative artistic wasteland, as people suffered from a post-holidays letdown with a dearth of high-quality movies and Broadway shows opening up. But this century continues to fill that void with more and more cutting-edge, experimental, and offbeat music, dance, film, and theater at unique performance festivals around the city. You can catch cabaret at Pangea, opera at Prototype, dance at the 92nd St. Y and New York Live Arts, jazz at JazzFest, Irish theater at Origin’s 1st, avant-garde music and film at New Ear, and a little of everything at Under the Radar. Sadly, the last few years have seen the demise of COIL and American Realness. Below are only some of the highlights of this exciting time to try something that might be outside your comfort zone and take a chance on something new and different to kick off your 2020, especially with the majority of tickets going for about twenty-five bucks.

NEW EAR FESTIVAL
Fridman Gallery
287 Spring St. by Hudson St.
January 6–12, $20, 8:00
www.fridmangallery.com

Monday, January 6
CT::SWaM ExChange, with Ginny Benson, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Dani Dobkin, Bernd Klug, and a very special guest

Tuesday, January 7
Victoria Keddie exchanges transmissions from Copenhagen, improvised animations and sound by Theodore Darst and Kevin Carey, and a performance by Adelaide Damoah

Wednesday, January 8
Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter of the Roots, with Zachary Tye Richardson, Vuyo Sotashe, Onyx Violins, and Brother Paul Daniels II

Thursday, January 9
Model Home, new commission by Brandon Lopez with TAK Ensemble, and Sa’dia Rehman

Friday, January 10
Susie Ibarra and Dreamtime Ensemble, Allard van Hoorn, and the Dream Mapping Project

Saturday, January 11
Violist Joanna Mattrey, percussionist William Hooker’s quartet, and Sophia Petrides

Sunday, January 12
DeForrest Brown Jr., Muyassar Kurdi and MV Carbon, and SHYBOI

UNDER THE RADAR
Public Theater and other venues
425 Lafayette St. by Astor Pl.
January 6–19
publictheater.org

January 6, 10, 12, 20
Daniel J. Watts’ The Jam: Only Child, with Daniel J. Watts and DJ Duggz, Joe’s Pub, $35

January 8–19
The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes, with Michael Chan, Simon Laherty, Sarah Mainwaring, and Scott Price, LuEsther Hall, Public Theater, $30

January 10–19
Selina Thompson: salt., with Rochelle Rose, Martinson Hall, Public Theater, $30

January 11–19
The Truth Has Changed, by Josh Fox & International WOW Company, Newman Theater, Public Theater, $30

January 11 & 17
Waterboy and the Mighty World by the HawtPlates, Shiva Theater, Public Theater, $25

London Assurance is part of Origin’s 1st Irish Festival (photo by Carol Rosegg)

ORIGIN’S 1st IRISH FESTIVAL
Multiple venues
January 7 – February 3
www.origintheatre.org

Through January 26
London Assurance, by Dion Boucicault, directed by Charlotte Moore, Irish Repertory Theatre, $50-$70

January 7–18
The 8th, written and directed by Seanie Sugrue, the Secret Theatre, $20

January 22 – February 2
The Scourge, by Michelle Dooley Mahon, directed by Ben Barnes, starring Michelle Dooley Mahon, Irish Repertory Theatre, $50

January 26 – February 1
Appropriate, by Sarah-Jane Scott, directed by Paul Meade, starring Sarah-Jane Scott, New York Irish Center, $26

January 27–28
Round Room: An Open Studio, by Honor Molloy, directed by Britt Berke, music by Susan McKeown, with Labhaoise Magee, Brenda Meaney, Rachel Pickup, Maeve Price, Zoe Watkins, and Aoife Williamson, the Alchemical Studios, $16

Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith will present Body Comes Apart at New York Live Arts (photo by Maria Baranova)

LIVE ARTERY
New York Live Arts
219 West 19th St.
January 8-14
newyorklivearts.org

Saturday, January 11
Kathy Westwater: Rambler, Worlds Worlds a Part, $10, 2:00
Kimberly Bartosik/Daela: Through the Mirror of Their Eyes, 5:00

Saturday, January 11, 9:00
Sunday, January 12, 12 noon
Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith: Body Comes Apart, $15

January 12-14
Sean Dorsey: Boys in Trouble, $15

Monday, January 13
Yanira Castro/a canary torsi: Last Audience, free with RSVP, 4:0

James ‘Blood’ Ulmer will be at the Sultan Room on January 11

WINTER JAZZFEST NYC
Multiple venues
January 8–18
www.winterjazzfest.com

Wednesday, January 8
GilleS Peterson (DJ Set), Lefto, Kassa Overall, Niblu, $20-$25, doors 8:00

Thursday, January 9
Lee Fields & the Expressions with Adeline, Brooklyn Bowl, $25, doors 7:00

Friday, January 10 & Saturday, January 11
Manhattan Marathon, multiple venues, $50-$75 one night, $95-$125 both nights

Saturday, January 11
James ‘Blood’ Ulmer Odyssey, Harriet Tubman, Sultan Room, $25-$30, doors 7:00

Thursday, January 16
Seu Jorge with Rogê, Anat Cohen & Choro Aventuroso, the Town Hall, $55-$85, 8:00

Friday, January 17
Brooklyn Marathon, multiple venues, $30-$55

PROTOTYPE
Multiple venues
January 9–19
www.prototypefestival.org

January 9, 12, 15–17
Blood Moon, by Ellen McLaughlin and composer Garrett Fisher, Baruch Performing Arts Center, $35-$75

January 11–17
Magdalene, chamber opera cocreated by performer Danielle Birrittella and director Zoe Aja Moore, with poetry by Marie Howe, HERE, $35-$75

January 10–11
Iron & Coal, rock opera by Jeremy Schonfeld, featuring Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Contemporaneous, MasterVoices, Rinde Eckert, and Daniel Rowan, Gerald W. Lynch Theater, $35-$75

January 14–15, 17–19
Ellen West, by poet Frank Bidart and composer Ricky Ian Gordon, Gelsey Kirkland Arts Center, $35-$75

January 15–18
Cion: Requiem of Ravel’s Boléro, by Gregory Maqoma, featuring Vuyani Dance Theatre, Joyce Theater, $10-$75

January 17–18
REV. 23, libretto by Cerise Lim Jacobs, composed by Julian Wachner, featuring Novus NY, Gerald W. Lynch Theater, $35-$75

Harkness Dance Center festival features Catherine Tharin, Kyle Marshall Choreography, and more

92Y HARKNESS DANCE CENTER ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE: ShAIRed SHOW AND MORE!
92nd St. Y
1395 Lexington Ave.
January 10-12, $15 in advance, $25 at the door
www.92y.org

Friday, January 10
King by Kyle Marshall Choreography, through the mirror of their eyes by Kimberly Bartosik (work-in progress excerpt), Quarry by Ivy Baldwin Dance, Good Rhythm Wonderful Life by Kazunori Kumagai, noon

Sunday, January 12
Good Rhythm Wonderful Life by Kazunori Kumagai, 3:00
through the mirror of their eyes by Kimberly Bartosik (work-in progress excerpt), 4:0
Of you from here by Catherine Tharin, 4:45
Quarry by Ivy Baldwin Dance, 5:30
A.D. by Kyle Marshall Choreography, 6:15
DECADOSE (excerpts) by cullen+them, 7:15

Raquel Cion will perform Me and Mr. Jones: My Intimate Relationship with David Bowie at Pangea Winter Alt-Fest

WINTER ALT-FEST
Pangea NYC
178 Second Ave.
January 10–18
www.pangeanyc.com

Tuesday, January 7, 14, 21
Barbara Bleier & Austin Pendleton, Bits and Pieces, $20-$25 plus $20 food/beverage minimum, 7:00

Friday, January 10
Vicki Kristina Barcelona, the songs of Tom Waits, $15-$20 plus $20 food/beverage minimum, 7:00

Hannah Reimann: Both Sides Now: The Music of Joni Mitchell 1966 – 1974, $20-$25 plus $20 food/beverage minimum, 9:30

Thursday, January 16, 7:00, and Friday, January 17, 9:30
Raquel Cion: Me and Mr. Jones: My Intimate Relationship with David Bowie, $20-$25 plus $20 food/beverage minimum

Friday, January 17
Susanne Mack: Where I Belong, $20-$25 plus $20 food/beverage minimum, 7:00

ANNA’S MUSIC AND MUSES

Karen Elson and Anna Sui will talk about music and muses at MADMuseum (photo courtesy Museum of Arts & Design)

Karen Elson and Anna Sui will talk about music and muses at MAD (photo courtesy Museum of Arts & Design)

Museum of Arts & Design
2 Columbus Circle at 58th St. & Eighth Ave.
Saturday, January 11, $30, 4:00
212-299-7777
madmuseum.org

In conjunction with its current exhibition “The World of Anna Sui,” the Museum of Arts & Design is hosting a series of related events. Next up is “Anna’s Music and Muses,” in which the Detroit-born fashion icon will sit down on January 11 with British musician and supermodel Karen Elson to discuss inspiration and collaboration. Sui, who won the Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009 at the age of forty-five, following in the footsteps of Diane von Furstenberg, Donna Karan, Anna Wintour, Karl Lagerfeld, Calvin Klein, Valentino, and Yves Saint Laurent among other fashion legends, told CBS that year, “I think whenever people talk about the ‘Anna Sui woman,’ they’re talking about someone that’s probably kind of more downtown, and there’s always like this ambiguity: Is she a good girl, or a bad girl?” Forty-year-old Elson, who hails from Greater Manchester, has released two albums, The Ghost Who Walks and Double Roses, is an ambassador for Save the Children, and has two children with former husband Jack White. “The World of Anna Sui” continues through February 23; on January 9, the series “Sui Screens,” featuring films that influenced Sui collections, will present 2006’s Marie Antoinette, followed by a Q&A with director Sofia Coppola, and will conclude February 20 with Ken Russell’s 1971 The Boy Friend, starring Twiggy.

VARDA — A RETROSPECTIVE: KUNG-FU MASTER!

Julien (Mathieu Demy) and Mary-Jane (Jane Birkin) fall for each other in Agnès Varda’s Kung-Fu Master!

KUNG-FU MASTER! (LE PETIT AMOUR) (Agnès Varda, 1988)
Film at Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Monday, January 6, 9:15
Series continues through January 8
www.filmlinc.org

Film at Lincoln Center’s “Varda: A Retrospective” continues January 6 with a real family affair, Agnès Varda’s curiously compelling 1988 drama Kung-Fu Master!, the French title of which is the more appropriate Le petit amour, or “The Little Love.” Written by Varda and English actress, model, and singer-songwriter Jane Birkin from Birkin’s idea, the film stars Birkin as Mary-Jane, a divorced forty-year-old woman living with her fourteen-year-old daughter, Lucy, portrayed with wide-eyed innocence by Charlotte Gainsbourg, Birkin’s real-life daughter with French superstar Serge Gainsbourg, and her younger child, Lou, played by Lou Doillon, Birkin’s daughter with French director Jacques Doillon. Mary-Jane falls in love practically at first sight with one of Lucy’s classmates, fourteen-year-old Julien, portrayed by Mathieu Demy, Varda’s son with French auteur Jacques Demy. Birkin’s parents, actress and playwright Judy Campbell and fine artist and actor David Birkin, play Mary-Jane’s mother and father, while Birkin’s brother, screenwriter Andrew Birkin, plays her brother. And Varda’s daughter, costume designer, actress, and producer Rosalie Varda, will be at the Walter Reade Theater on January 6 to introduce the screening. Varda often liked to blur the line between fiction and nonfiction, but don’t let all that reality confuse you: Kung-Fu Master! is most certainly not a documentary, thank goodness.

Mother and daughter Jane Birkin and Charlotte Gainsbourg star as mother and daughter in Kung-Fu Master!

Somewhat reminiscent of Bertrand Blier’s 1981 Beau-père, in which thirty-year-old Rémi (Patrick Dewaere) falls for his fourteen-year-old stepdaughter, Marion (Ariel Besse), Kung-Fu Master! treads in dangerous territory, exploring a taboo love, even as it does so with care and sensitivity and a tender performance by Birkin. Mary-Jane is well aware that she should not be considering a relationship with a young boy, but she has a yearning to explore the furthest boundaries of desire. However, her choice of Julien is beyond strange, as he is an ordinary teen, who plays Dungeons and Dragons and the arcade game Kung-Fu Master! and has banal conversations with his peers; he is not some hulking, mature figure who is smart and sophisticated for his age. “I know I won’t be around when you start shaving,” Mary-Jane tells Julien. The film also refers repeatedly to the AIDS crisis, which the teenagers are only just learning about and dismiss as somebody else’s problem. Varda never brings the AIDS subplot full circle; perhaps it’s there primarily to emphasize the dangers sex can bring, but she leaves that thread hanging. You’re likely to feel dirty watching Kung-Fu Master!, but you also won’t be able to look away. (Birkin/Gainsbourg fans will also want to check out “Birkin Gainsbourg The Symphonic Starring Jane Birkin” at the Beacon Theatre on March 6, with special guests Iggy Pop and Charlotte Gainsbourg.)

THREE KINGS DAY PARADE 2020

El Museo del Barrio
1230 Fifth Ave. at 104th St.
Monday, January 6, free, 11:00 am – 3:00 pm
212-831-7272
www.elmuseo.org

El Museo del Barrio’s celebration of the Epiphany will make its way through East Harlem on Monday, paying tribute to the three kings who brought gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the manger. The forty-third annual event, titled “Nuestros Barrios Unidos: Celebrating Our Collective Strength,” will feature live music and dance by BombaYo, Los Pleneros de la 21, Annette Aguilar & the Stringbeans, Wabafu Garifuna Dance Theater, and others, large-size puppets, parrandas, floats, and live camels and more animals beginning at 11:00 at 106th St. near Park Ave., then heads north to 115th. At 1:00, the festivities move indoors at the museum, where there will be workshops for children beginning at 1:00, along with live performances by Teatro 220 and Annette Aguilar & the Stringbeans in El Museo’s El Teatro. This year’s king emeritus is poet and author Jesus “Papoleto” Melendez, and the kings are artist and photographer Hiram Maristany, former Telemundo senior anchor Jorge Ramos, and Board of Regents chancellor Dr. Betty A. Rosa, with madrinas Blanka Amezkua, Eileen Reyes-Arias, Nancy Mercado, Ana “Rokafella” Garcia, and Alicia Grullon and padrinos Marcel Agueros, Gabriel “Kwikstep” Dionisio, Gonzalo Mercado, Henry Obispo, and Luis Reyes. Admission to the galleries is free, so be sure to check out “An Emphasis on Resistance: 2019 CIFO Grants & Commissions Program Exhibition” and “Zilia Sánchez: Soy Isla (I Am an Island).”

THE CONTENDERS 2019: UNCUT GEMS

Adam Sandler plays a diamond dealer in danger in Uncut Gems

UNCUT GEMS (Josh Safdie & Benny Safdie, 2018)
MoMA, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Friday, January 3, 7:00
Series continues through January 8
www.moma.org
a24films.com

“That was manic, pure mania,” the Safdie brothers narrate at the end of a trailer for their latest film, Uncut Gems. You can hear Josh Safdie and Benny Safdie say more about the film, a manic gem, when they discuss it following the January 3 screening at MoMA as part of the “Contenders” series, consisting of 2019 films that the institution believes will stand the test of time. Uncut Gems is a furious, unrelenting movie that sucks you into its claustrophobic frenzy and never lets go. Adam Sandler is a force, reaching new heights as Howard Ratner, a Diamond District dealer with a gambling addiction. He’s deep in debt to Arno (Eric Bogosian), who has sent his two goons, Phil (Keith Williams Richards) and Nico (Tommy Kominik), to make sure Howard knows just how much trouble he is in. His wife, Dinah (Idina Menzel), is fed up with him, not in the least because he has an apartment with his mistress, the much younger Julia (Julia Fox), and is not the most reliable father to their children, Eddie (Jonathan Aranbayev, who was discovered on Forty-Seventh St. in front of his parents’ jewelry store), Beni (Jacob Igielski), and Marcel (Noa Fisher).

Howard has a master plan to break free of all his problems by selling a chunk of Ethiopian black opals at an auction, with the help of one of his assistants, Demany (Lakeith Stanfield), who has lured in Boston Celtics center Kevin Garnett (terrific in his acting debut), who is fascinated by the rare, uncut gems, which sparkle with promise. The last half hour of the film is a brilliant, claustrophobic tour-de-force in which everyone onscreen is physically trapped, just like the audience is pinned to their seats, holding on for dear life. The Safdies, whose father worked in the Diamond District, use a mix of professional and nonprofessional actors as well as famous people playing themselves; the cast includes sports-radio legend Mike Francesa as a bookie, Garment District legend Wayne Diamond as a big-time gambler, Judd Hirsch as Howard’s father, Natasha Lyonne and Tilda Swinton as phone voices, and restaurant owner Nino Selimaj, writer Larry “Ratso” Sloman, actor John Amos, the Weeknd, and others as themselves.

Written by the Safdies (Daddy Longlegs, Heaven Knows What) with longtime collaborator Ronald Bronstein, Uncut Gems, which has been in process for ten years, is anchored by a career-redefining performance by Sandler, who previously revealed his significant acting chops in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2002 Punch-Drunk Love and Judd Apatow’s 2009 Funny People. In a performance that will make you forgive him for The Waterboy, Big Daddy, Little Nicky, and Mr. Deeds, among other silly effluvia, Sandler is a whirlwind throughout the film’s 135 minutes, which fly by. Darius Khondji’s camera is practically glued to him, Sandler’s unshaven, gruff face a character unto itself, Howard’s eyes always at least one step ahead of what’s happening in front of him. He’s a dreamer, and although you can’t not root for him, he is far from a likable hero. He is singlehandedly responsible for the dangerous mess he’s in, whether he admits it to himself or not. But he is also a kind of everyman, peering through the looking glass (in this case, the seductive, multicolored opals in the stone), trying to survive in a hectic, frenetic world that can be overwhelming and spin out of control at any moment. You can’t just sit back, relax, and enjoy Uncut Gems; instead, you can’t help but be fully immersed in its nonstop, feverish intensity. “The Contenders 2019” continues through January 8 with such other recent, well-received as Jérémy Clapin’s adult anime I Lost My Body, Sam Mendes’s WWI drama 1917, and Melina Matsoukas’s Queen and Slim.

JASON MORAN

Stan Douglas, Luanda-Kinshasa, 2013. Video, color, sound; 6:01 hours. © Stan Douglas; Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York

Jason Moran performs in Stan Douglas’s six-hour 2013 video Luanda-Kinshasa (© Stan Douglas / courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York)

Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort St.
Through January 5 (adults $25, eighteen and under free
whitney.org

Atop his official website, Jason Moran identifies himself simply as “Musician.” As his retrospective at the Whitney reveals, he is much more than that. Born in Houston in January 1975, jazz pianist and composer Moran released his debut album, Soundtrack to Human Motion, twenty years ago and has expanded his horizons significantly since then. In addition to recording such discs as Facing Left, Same Mother, Artist in Residence, Bangs, and Looks of a Lot, many with his group, the Bandwagon, consisting of bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits, he collaborates with a bevy of visual artists, creates large-scale installations, and makes eye-catching drawings.

Installation view of Jason Moran (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 20, 2019-January 5, 2020). From left to right: Jason Moran, Run 2, 2016; Jason Moran, Run 6, 2016; Jason Moran, Strutter’s Ball, 2016; Jason Moran, Blue (Creed) Gravity 1, 2018; Jason Moran, Black and Blue Gravity, 2018. Photograph by Ron Amstutz

Jason Moran’s music-inspired drawings are a highlight of multidisciplinary show at the Whitney (photograph by Ron Amstutz)

The show, simply titled “Jason Moran,” is an eye-opening exploration of a multitalented artist, one of the most surprisingly delightful exhibits of the year. Upon entering the eighth floor, you encounter Moran’s “Run,” an ongoing series of works in which Moran tapes a sheet of paper, often a vintage player piano roll, over his piano, caps his fingers in charcoal and dry pigment of different colors, and plays the keyboard, resulting in horizontal abstract images that he gives such titles as Black and Blue Gravity and Two Wings 2. Screening on a loop in the far corner is Glenn Ligon’s The Death of Tom, what was supposed to be a re-creation of the final scene from Edison/Porter’s 1903 silent movie Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which white actors played the main characters in blackface, but it turned into something very different because Ligon improperly loaded the film, resulting in what he called “blurry, fluttery, burnt-out black-and-white images, all light and shadows.” Moran improvised the score based on Bert Williams and Alex Rogers’s 1905 song “Nobody,” a hit for the black vaudeville team of Williams and George Walker, who fought racism on the road and stereotypes in their live performances. The Death of Tom might not have been the film Ligon set out to make, but it still takes on the same ideas.

Installation view of Jason Moran (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 20, 2019-January 5, 2020). Projections: Kara Walker, National Archives Microfilm M999 Roll 34: Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands: Six Miles from Springfield on the Franklin Road, 2009. Stages from left to right: Jason Moran, STAGED: Slugs’ Saloon, 2018; Jason Moran, STAGED: Savoy Ballroom 1, 2015. Photograph by Ron Amstutz

Jason Moran exhibition features room of large-scale installations and three-channel videos (photograph by Ron Amstutz)

The main room of the exhibit is a beaut, featuring a trio of sculptural installations inspired by the stages of historic New York City jazz clubs, Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, Midtown’s Three Deuces, and the Lower East Side’s Slugs’ Saloon. Three large screens show behind-the-scenes footage and/or full short films from ten of Moran’s collaborations, with such artists as Joan Jonas, Carrie Mae Weems, Adam Pendleton, Julie Mehretu, Ryan Trecartin, Lizzie Fitch, and Theaster Gates. In Lorna Simpson’s three-channel Chess, on two screens the artist plays chess in a mirrored room that makes it look like there are five of her; she’s dressed as a man in one, a woman in the other. Meanwhile, on the third screen, Moran plays the piano in a similarly mirrored space, improvising one of Brahms’s fifty-one exercises for piano. The black-and-white keyboard mimics the black-and-white chess sets as both Moran and Simpson display expert finger control.

Lorna Simpson, still from Chess, three-channel video, black-and-white, sound, 2013 (courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth / © Lorna Simpson)

Kara Walker’s National Archives Microfilm M999 Roll 34: Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands: Six Miles from Springfield on the Franklin Road is a thirteen-plus-minute full-color video using her trademark cut-paper silhouettes like shadow puppets to tell the story of brutal violence perpetrated against an African American family during the Reconstruction era. (On October 12, Moran and Walker teamed up for the New York premiere of her Katastwóf Karavan, in which he played a steam-powered calliope housed in Walker’s old-fashioned circus wagon adorned with cut-steel silhouettes depicting powerful slave scenes.) In between some of the videos are interludes in which improvisations by Moran emit from a player piano on the “Three Deuces” stage. On January 3 and 4, Tiger Trio, consisting of pianist Myra Melford, bassist Joëlle Léandre, and flutist Nicole Mitchell, will perform at the Whitney as part of the “Jazz on a High Floor in the Afternoon” program.

Finally, around a corner, Stan Douglas’s Luanda-Kinshasa brings together Jason Moran and a group of other musicians in a fictitious recording session in a reconstruction of Columbia’s 30th Street Studio, known as the Church, where between 1949 and 1981 such artists as Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Vladimir Horowitz, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, and Miles Davis made albums. Inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s Rolling Stones concert film Sympathy for the Devil, Douglas films the band over two days in a 1970s-style setting, improvising as if this is a follow-up to Miles Davis’s 1971 album Live-Evil, part of which was recorded at the Church. Douglas himself improvises through the editing process, ending up with a six-hour jam session. Be sure to allow plenty of time to experience “Jason Moran,” an artistic jam session you won’t soon forget.

WHAT SHE SAID: THE ART OF PAULINE KAEL

The life and career of film critic Pauline Kael is profiled in documentary What She Said

WHAT SHE SAID: THE ART OF PAULINE KAEL (Rob Garver, 2018)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Wednesday, December 25
212-727-8110
www.whatshesaidmovie.com
filmforum.org

I would love to read Pauline Kael’s review of Rob Garver’s What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, a documentary about the influential and pugnacious film critic who wrote about movies in her own unique, highly subjective way for nearly forty years. But the California-born Kael passed away in 2001 at the age of eighty-two, and we’ll never know. But in the film, which opens Christmas Day at Film Forum, we do learn about what many of her supporters and detractors, colleagues, fans (known as Paulettes), and targets thought of her. “We’re not talking about film criticism here; we’re talking about Pauline Kael,” explains writer and director Paul Schrader, who referred to Kael as his “second mother” in a 2001 Film Comment essay. “And, in the end of the game, what Pauline Kael promoted wasn’t film. It was her.”

Garver traces Kael’s career from her early days writing (ever-so-briefly) for McCall’s and the New Republic before moving to the New Yorker, where she covered “The Current Cinema” from 1968 to 1991, aside from a six-month hiatus when she attempted to produce a film with Warren Beatty for Paramount. Garver combines new and old interviews with Kael’s home movies and private photographs, television appearances, and narrated clips from her reviews and letters; among those discussing Kael and her work — the two are inseparable — are filmmakers John Boorman, Robert Towne, Quentin Tarantino, and David O. Russell, actor Alec Baldwin, writers Molly Haskell, Greil Marcus, Stephanie Zacharek, David Edelstein, Camille Paglia, Michael Sgragow, Joe Morgenstern, and Lili Anolik, and, seen in archival footage, Woody Allen, Norman Mailer (who referred to Kael as “lady vinegar”), Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Evans, Jerry Lewis, David Lean, and others. “Pauline could be very combative and very provocative and she could be cruel, for no reason,” Pulitzer Prize winner Morgenstern notes; Lean stopped making films for several years after Kael excoriated him at a luncheon.

We hear a lot from Kael, who split her time between New York City and her country home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, through archival footage as well as narration by Sarah Jessica Parker, who reads excerpts from Kael’s personal and professional writings; in her last review, of Steve Martin’s 1991 film L.A. Story, Kael called Parker a “bouncy nymph.” While she was loathed by plenty of people inside and outside the industry, Kael was also beloved and needed by others. She says, “People don’t tend to like a good critic. They tend to hate your guts. If they like you, I think you should start getting worried.” Marlene Dietrich wrote to her, “I am quite lost without your opinions on films.” Directors such as Wes Anderson would send her their films even after she retired, just to hear what she thought. But her daughter, Gina James, notes, “There are times when people will tell me something that she said to them and I think, that’s impossible, and then I realize they couldn’t have made it up because it is just shocking.”

Garver (Comic Belief, The Man in the Yellow Cap) also includes snippets from hundreds of films; while the clips from such movies as Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine, Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music, Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à part, Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour, Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, and Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War are effective because they are shown in context with her reviews of those films, the snippets are also overused as punctuation, adding an unnecessary exclamation point at the end of a sentence to drive home a point that is already clear. For example, when Edelstein states, “Pauline would write about something, and you would not only love reading it, but then you would want to see what she wrote about so you could argue with her, or you could relive it with her, you could see it through her eyes,” Garver follows that with a scene from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver in which Robert DeNiro as Travis Bickle puts his fingers over his eyes as he watches a movie. It might be cute, but it’s also extraneous.

Ultimately, Garver’s main point is that love her or hate her, Kael, who left behind a vast legacy of her writings, including thirteen books (I Lost It at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang), and had several unsuccessful relationships with men, changed how we approach film criticism and experience films themselves. “She turned the movie review, which is this kind of flimsy vehicle — it’s a thumbs-up or thumbs-down endeavor — into this expressive art form. I mean, it was as expressive as the short story or the sonnet,” writer Lili Anolik says. Film Forum is hosting several Q&As and panel discussions during the scheduled two-week run, with Garver December 26 and 27 at 7:00, December 28 at 4:30, and December 29 with composer Rick Baitz as well at 2:30, with Zacharek and Monica Castillo on January 2 at 7:00, and with Owen Gleiberman on January 4 at 4:30.