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

HIROSHI SUGIMOTO: ON PHOTOGRAPHY AND JAPANESE ART

Hiroshi Sugimoto will be at Asia Society on November 30 to discuss his latest work (photo courtesy Sugimoto Studio)

Who: Hiroshi Sugimoto, Dr. Yasufumi Nakamori
What: Artist talk about the photography of Hiroshi Sugimoto
Where: Asia Society Museum, 725 Park Ave. at Seventieth St.
When: Thursday, November 30, $15, 6:30
Why: You’ll have to travel to London to catch the largest survey to date of the work of Japanese photographer and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto, on view through January 7 at Hayward Gallery. But Asia Society on the Upper East Side is offering the next best thing: Seeing Sugimoto himself. On November 30 at 6:30, the seventy-five-year-old Tokyo-born artist, who is based in Tokyo and New York City, will be at Asia Society for an artist talk, “On Photography and Japanese Art,” speaking with Asia Society museum director Yasufumi Nakamori, focusing on Sugimoto’s latest series, “Brush Impression,” featuring calligraphic brushstrokes on photographic paper, started during the coronavirus crisis.

“When I finally returned to my New York studio after the three-year-long disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, I discovered that I was in possession of a large amount of photographic paper which had passed its expiry date. Rather like fresh food, this special paper for photographic printing deteriorates over time,” Sugimoto explains in his artist statement. “The defining feature of my prints is the subtle expression of different shades, something that is very hard to achieve with photographic paper that is even slightly degraded. What I therefore did was to flip my thinking, Copernicus-style. My idea was not to accept deterioration as deterioration per se but to treat it as a form of beautification instead. When ancient works of art are exposed to the operations of time, deterioration usually causes an aesthetic improvement. The white of photographic paper looks rather like albumenized paper, while black tones acquire a certain softness on it. I decided to bring the calligraphy skills I had mastered during three years of enforced leisure into the dark room. In the dim room suffused with pale orange light, I spread out a sheet of photographic paper, then dunk my brush into the developer. In the darkness, I gropingly draw the characters which I cannot actually see. Then, just for a fleeting moment, I expose the paper to a burst of light like a flash.

“Just the areas which are touched by the brush metamorphose into Japanese characters and float to the surface in black. Having shown that it was possible to do calligraphy using a developer, I then tried dipping my brush in photographic fixer. I plied my bush surrounded by the stench of acid; this time it was white characters appearing on a jet-black ground. As I wrote, I tried to concentrate on the invisible characters, focusing my mind on the place where the meaning of the characters would manifest itself. Protean and shapeshifting, fire is an extraordinary thing. Gaze at it and you will feel yourself being drawn into another world. This planet of ours was originally born from the fires of the sun. A blazing flame is at once a sacrament of birth and an echo of a burned-out death. Sometimes, as here, the burning flame flings out its arms and legs to be transcribed as the kanji character for fire.”

Sugimoto has proved himself to be a genius with such exhibitions as “History of History,” “Still Life,” “Gates of Paradise,” and “Sea of Buddha” as well as such performances as Rikyu-Enoura and Sanbaso, divine dance, so be ready for a fascinating evening.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

ISABELLE HUPPERT AT THE QUAD

Isabelle will be in person — not on the phone — at the Quad for Q&As following screenings of Jean-Paul Salomé’s La Syndicaliste

Who: Isabelle Huppert
What: Screenings followed by Q&As
Where: Quad Cinema, 34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
When: December 1-2 (festival continues all month)
Why: For more than half a century, French actress Isabelle Huppert has been one of cinema’s brightest stars. She’s appeared in more than 130 films, working with a who’s who of international directors, including Claude Chabrol, Márta Mészáros, Jean-Luc Godard, Diane Kurys, Bertrand Tavernier, David O. Russell, Joachim Trier, Hal Hartley, Ursula Meier, Bertrand Blier, Curtis Hanson, Hong Sang-soo, Ira Sachs, Paul Verhoeven, Wes Anderson, Michael Cimino, and Michael Haneke. She’s also done more than thirty plays, including 4.48 Psychose, The Maids, and The Mother in New York.

Huppert will be back in New York on December 1 and 2, participating in Q&As following screenings of Jean-Paul Salomé’s Venice Film Festival selection La Syndicaliste, a thriller in which Huppert plays real-life Irish trade unionist and whistleblower Maureen Kearney. Huppert will be at the Quad for the 7:15 show on December 1 and the 4:15 and 7:15 shows on December 2. The Quad will also be presenting “Restorations Starring Isabelle Huppert,” part of its ongoing “From the Vault: The Cohen Film Collection” series, on three Wednesdays in December: Benoît Jacquot’s 1999 Keep It Quiet on December 6, André Téchiné’s 1979 The Brontë Sisters on December 13, and Maurice Pialat’s 1980 Loulou on December 20. Finally, her latest film, François Ozon’s The Crime Is Mine, a murder mystery adapted from a 1934 play, opens exclusively at the Quad on December 25. Huppert, who turned seventy this past March, is as resplendent as ever, so these Q&As are must-see events.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

THE WILD PARROTS OF TELEGRAPH HILL 4K RESTORATION

Mark Bittner feeds several cherry-headed conures in The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill

THE WILD PARROTS OF TELEGRAPH HILL (Judy Irving, 2003)
New Plaza Cinema @Macaulay Honors College
35 West Sixty-Seventh St. between Central Park West & Columbus Ave.
Opens Friday, November 17
newplazacinema.org
pelicanmedia.org

Judy Irving begins her 2003 documentary, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, with a shot of a skeptical passerby who has stopped to watch Mark Bittner as he cares for a flock of forty-five cherry-headed conures, also known as red-masked parakeets, living in the trees outside his apartment.

“They’re not really wild if you have names for them, if you don’t mind my saying,” the man claims. “You feed them out of your hands, you have names for them, and they come up to you like they’re your pets. . . . Well, whatever.” He then shrugs and walks away.

The exchange doesn’t bother Bittner at all; he gleefully answers the suspicious man’s doubts and just continues doing what he’s doing, a big smile on his face.

It’s an extremely clever way to start the film, which opens November 17 in a brand-new 4K twentieth anniversary digital restoration at New Plaza Cinema. With the question of Bittner’s relationship with the birds resolved right up front, Irving, who served as director, producer, editor, and cinematographer, is free to now follow Bittner’s odd life choice.

Born in Vancouver, Washington, in 1951, Bittner moved from Seattle to Berkeley when he was twenty and then to San Francisco with the goal of making it as a rock-and-roll musician, in search of a “real transformation.” In 1993, he became infatuated with the conures, some of whom had previously been pets and others that had been born in the wild. Over the course of several years, he devoted his life to them, giving them names, caring for them when they were ill, watching out for predatory hawks, and keeping a somewhat scientific journal of their comings and goings and their individual personalities.

As if he’s sharing the plot of a soap opera, he talks about Scrapper and Scraperella’s breakup; discusses the pairing of Picasso and Sophie; introduces us to Fanny, Gibson, Flap, Pushkin, and Olive; sings to Mingus to get him dancing; vacuums up the mess the birds make in his apartment; nurses Tupelo; and bonds deeply with Connor, the only blue-crowned conure in the flock, an older bird who cannot find a mate or best friend. Connor is not unlike Bittner, a single man with thick glasses, a bushy beard and mustache, and a long ponytail who apparently has no close friends either.

“I don’t think of myself as an eccentric,” he says in his calm, relaxing voice.

Inspired by such Beat writers as Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac, Bittner is a kind of throwback, an easygoing Bohemian going with the flow, living for free without a paying job. “It wasn’t a plan; it just happened,” he says about his caring for the birds. “It was what I was doing while I was trying to figure out what that thing would be, my idea of where I was going to go in my life. But it became the thing that I’m doing. It’s magic that way.”

But that magic threatens to disappear when he is forced to leave his apartment and has to figure out what will happen to the birds.

Irving, who appears in the film, originally intended the project to be a short but ended up compiling thirty hours of 16mm footage over a few years on a shoestring budget. “When I first met him, I thought Mark was an inarticulate hippy recluse and he thought I was an ecofeminist lesbian,” she writes in a new article for Talkhouse. That changed as filming continued.

A companion piece to Bittner’s 2004 memoir of the same name (the book has the added subtitle A Love Story . . . with Wings), The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill is a tender and touching — and colorful — look at not just one man’s dedication to conures but the connection between humanity and nature, as well as the need for people to be a part of something, like a bird in a flock. We are not built for solitude. And that comes to fruition in a sweet shocker of a finale involving Irving (Pelican Dreams, Dark Circle), who will be at New Plaza Cinema for Q&As following the 6:10 screening on November 17 and the 2:40 shows on November 18 and 19.

Meanwhile, Bittner is working on his next book, Street Song, which will be accompanied by an album featuring such originals as “Poppa John,” “The Arrow You Want,” and “You’re So Peaceful” and covers of tunes by Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

REVERSE SHOT AT 20: SELECTIONS FROM A CENTURY: MANAKAMANA

MANAKAMANA

A mother and daughter eat ice cream in experimental documentary Manakamana

MANAKAMANA (Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez, 2013)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, November 18, 12:30, & Sunday, November 19, 3:30
Festival continues through November 26
www.manakamanafilm.com
movingimage.us

If you’re an adventurous filmgoer who likes to be challenged and surprised, the less you know about Pacho Velez and Stephanie Spray’s Manakamana, the better. But if you want to know more, here goes: Evoking such experimental films as Michael Snow’s Wavelength, Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma, and Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests as well as the more narrative works of such unique auteurs as Jim Jarmusch and Abbas Kiarostami, Manakamana is a beautiful, meditative journey that is sure to try your patience at first. The two-hour film, which requires a substantial investment on the part of the audience, takes place in a five-foot-by-five-foot cable car in Nepal that shuttles men, women, and children to and from the historic Manakamana temple, on a pilgrimage to worship a wish-fulfilling Hindu goddess. With Velez operating the stationary Aaton 7 LTR camera — the same one used by Robert Gardner for his 1986 documentary Forest of Bliss — and Spray recording the sound, the film follows a series of individuals and small groups as they either go to or return from the temple, traveling high over the lush green landscape that used to have to be traversed on foot before the cable car was built. A man and his son barely acknowledge each other; a woman carries a basket of flowers on her lap; an elderly mother and her middle-age daughter try to eat melting ice-cream bars; a pair of musicians play their instruments to pass the time.

A heavy metal band takes a picture of themselves in meditative documentary

A heavy metal band takes a picture of themselves in meditative documentary

Each trip has its own narrative, which must be partly filled in by the viewer as he or she studies the people in the cable car and the surroundings, getting continually jolted as the car glides over the joins. The film is a fascinating look into human nature and technological advances in this era of surveillance as the subjects attempt to act as normal as possible even though a camera and a microphone are practically in their faces. Produced at the Sensory Ethnography Laboratory at Harvard, Manakamana consists of eleven uncut shots of ten-to-eleven minutes filmed in 16mm, using rolls whose length roughly equals that of each one-way trip, creating a kind of organic symbiosis between the making and projecting of the work while adding a time-sensitive expectation on the part of the viewer.

A film well worth sticking around for till the very end — and one that grows less and less claustrophobic with each scene — Manakamana is screening November 18 and 19 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image series “Reverse Shot at 20: Selections from a Century,” honoring the twentieth anniversary of the film publication Reverse Shot, which has been its in-house journal since 2014; the two-month retrospective highlights twenty-first-century works touted by what was originally a stapled zine. Velez will be present at the November 19 show to discuss the film; both screenings will be preceded by the 2014 video Reverse Shot Talkie: Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez. “Spray and Velez’s film calls attention to attention, the ways our thoughts and perceptions slowly drift and return during long durations spent looking at certain subjects or familiar scenarios,” Leo Goldsmith wrote in Reverse Shot.

DOWN IN DALLAS TOWN: FROM JFK TO K2

Alan Govenar returns to Dealey Plaza in Down in Dallas Town: From JFK to K2

Who: Film director Alan Govenar
What: New York City theatrical premiere of Down in Dallas Town From JFK to K2, with 7:00 screenings opening weekend followed by director Q&As
Where: Cinema Village, 22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
When: November 17-23
Why: In conjunction with the sixtieth anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy at the age of forty-six on November 22, 1963, poet, writer, folklorist, photographer, and filmmaker Alan Govenar travels back to Dealey Plaza to take another look at that fateful day and how it has impacted contemporary society in the documentary Down in Dallas Town: From JFK to K2, opening November 17 at Cinema Village. Govenar mixes archival audio and television footage with new interviews of eyewitnesses, Kennedy experts, tourists, musicians, and more, including the first-ever interview of Mary Ann Moorman, who talks about her iconic Polaroid snapshot of the event. The film also explores many of the songs written about JFK and the murder, by such groups as the Dixie Nightingales, Los Conquistadores, the Southern Bell Singers, Freddy King, and the Sensational Six. Along the way, Govenar wonders whether JFK’s policies could have prevented the rampant homelessness, designer drug epidemic, and gun violence so prevalent in America today.

In previous films, Govenar examined tattoo legends (Tattoo Uprising), the NEA’s National Heritage Fellowships (Extraordinary Ordinary People), multidisciplinary artist Sidiki Conde, who has lost the use of his lower body (You Don’t Need Feet to Dance), and a nameless hotel that became a gathering place for Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, and others (The Beat Hotel). Here he turns his attention to a moment in American history that caused a paradigm shift that is still felt today. “Kennedy was the best president we had. I wish we still had him,” Robert from Maine tells Govenar. Down in Dallas Town is more than just another movie about JFK, and Govenar will be at Cinema Village for Q&As following the 7:00 screenings opening weekend to take it even further.

DOC NYC 2023 CENTERPIECE: UNCROPPED

Photojournalist James Hamilton is the subject of fascinating documentary (photo by Jody Caravaglia)

UNCROPPED (D. W. Young, 2023)
Available online through November 26
Festival runs November 8-26 at IFC Center, SVA Theatre, Village East by Angelika, and Bar Veloce, $13-$30
www.docnyc.net
www.uncroppedfilm.com

Once upon a time, documentaries were primarily the purview of public television and a handful of small, independent theaters in big cities. But with the explosion of streaming services and technological improvements in camera phones, we now have the ability to see more nonfiction films than ever, taking us places we’ve never been before while introducing us to a wide range of sociopolitical issues and extraordinary, and nefarious, individuals. The fourteenth annual DOC NYC festival got underway November 8, kicking off nearly three weeks of more than two hundred films and special events, including thirty world premieres and twenty-six US debuts. It’s been exciting watching the growth of the festival itself, from its relatively humble beginnings in 2010.

The opening-night selection was Clair Titley’s The Contestant, about aspiring Japanese comedian Tomoaki Hamatsu, who, unbeknownst to him, becomes a reality-show star; Sam Pollard and Llewellyn Smith’s South to Black Power is the closing-night film, a look at controversial New York Times columnist Charles Blow, with Pollard, Smith, and Blow participating in a Q&A.

The centerpiece is the world premiere of D. W. Young’s warm and lovely Uncropped, which is as gentle and unassuming as its subject, photographer James Hamilton, who should be a household name. But fame and fortune are clearly not the point for Hamilton, who grew up in Westport, Connecticut, and didn’t own his own camera until he was twenty. He’s lived in the same cramped Greenwich Village apartment since 1966 and has little online presence, especially when compared to several other photographers named James Hamilton.

“James’s work is refreshingly devoid of ego,” Sonic Youth cofounder Thurston Moore says in the film, letting out a laugh. “Let’s put it that way.”

The soft-spoken, easygoing Hamilton notes, “My whole career was all about having fun.”

And what fun it’s been.

Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine are among the many famous and not-so-famous people photographed by James Hamilton (photo by James Hamilton)

Hamilton got his start by forging a press pass to gain entry to the Texas International Pop Festival in 1969 and used the shots to get a staff job at Crawdaddy magazine. He later took pictures for the Herald, Harper’s Bazaar, the Village Voice, New York magazine, the London Times, and the New York Observer. He photographed rock stars and fashion icons; joined with print journalists to cover local, national, and international news events, including wars; shot unique behind-the-scene footage on such film sets as Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, Bill Paxton’s Frailty, and George A. Romero’s Knightriders; and captured life on the streets of New York City and elsewhere.

Among the people Young talks to are journalists Joe Conason, Alexandra Jacobs, Michael Daly, Thulani Davis, Richard Goldstein, Mark Jacobson, and Kathy Dobie, editors Eva Prinz and Susan Vermazen, and photographers David Lee and Sylvia Plachy. Young, who also edited the film and produced it with Judith Mizrachy, cuts in hundreds of Hamilton’s photos, which run the gamut from celebrities, politicians, and musicians to business leaders, kids playing, and brutal war scenes, accompanied by a jazzy score by David Ullmann, performed by Ullmann, Vincent Sperrazza, and others.

Hamilton, who has never been a fan of being interviewed, sits down and chats with Plachy, who shares fabulous stories of their time at the Voice; journalist and close friend Jacobson, who Hamilton took pictures for on numerous adventures; Conason, who discusses their transition from the Voice to the Observer; Dobie, who gets personal; and Prinz and Moore together. “We never crop James Hamilton’s photographs,” Prinz points out, raving about his remarkable eye for composition.

Uncropped, which will be available online through November 26, also serves as an insightful document of more than fifty years of New York City journalism, tracing the beginnings of underground coverage to today’s online culture where professional, highly qualified, experienced writers and photographers are having trouble getting published and paid. But through it all, Hamilton has persevered.

in his previous film, The Booksellers, Young focused on bibliophiles who treasure physical books as works of art even as the internet changes people’s relationships with books and how they read and purchase them. One of the experts Young meets with is Nancy Bass Wyden, owner of the Strand, an independent bookstore founded in 1927 and still hanging on against Amazon, B&N, and other chains and conglomerates.

Near the end of Uncropped, Young shows Hamilton and Dobie perusing the outdoor stacks of cheap books at the Strand, dinosaurs still relishing the perhaps-soon-to-be-gone days of print but always in search of more fun.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

COMPLEXIONS CONTEMPORARY BALLET: DREAM ON

Dwight Rhoden’s Ballad Unto . . . is part of Complexions two-week season at the Joyce

COMPLEXIONS CONTEMPORARY BALLET
The Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
November 14-26, $62-92
212-691-9740
www.joyce.org
www.complexionsdance.org

Complexions Contemporary Ballet returns to the Joyce this week, kicking off its two-week fall season displaying the diversity that has been its trademark since its founding by Dwight Rhoden and Desmond Richardson in 1994. The company will present three programs plus a sold-out gala, offering work from a wide range of choreographers.

The gala, honoring artistic advisor and Ailey instructor Sarita Allen, will be held on November 14, with Dream On, set to a poem by CCB inaugural poet-journalist-in-residence Aaron Dworkin; Rhoden’s Black Is Beautiful, a 2022 pandemic film making its live debut, with the Pre-Professional Students of Howard University; Justin Peck’s The Dreamers, a 2016 duet set to music by Bohuslav Martinů; Rhoden’s 2015 Ballad Unto . . . , set to music by Bach; and excerpts from Ricardo Amarante’s Love Fear Loss (inspired by the life of Édith Piaf) and the world premieres of Jenn Freeman’s Regardless and Rhoden’s For Crying Out Loud (with music from the U2 album Songs of Surrender).

Program A consists of Ballad Unto . . . , For Crying Out Loud, Love Fear Loss (with pianist Brian Wong), and Regardless (with drummer Price McGuffey). Program B comprises The Dreamers and Rhoden’s 2020 solo Elegy, 2023 Blood Calls Blood, 2020 eight-movement Endgame / Love One, and Ballad Unto. . . . Program C features The Dreamers, Elegy, Blood Calls Blood, For Crying Out Loud, and Ballad Unto. . . .

The November 15 performance will be followed by a Curtain Chat, and there will be a family matinee on November 18. The CCD dancers include Alberto Andrade, Christian Burse, Jacopo Calvo, Kobe Atwood Courtney, Jasmine Heart Cruz, Jillian Davis, Vincenzo Di Primo, Angelo De Serra, Chloe Duryea, Joe Gonzalez, Alexander Haquia, Aristotle Luna, Marissa Mattingly, Laura Perich, Miguel Solano, Lucy Stewart, Candy Tong, Manuel Vaccaro, and April Watson.

“We are thrilled to be headed back to the Joyce with ‘Dream On,’ a dynamic program that showcases the talent and incredible range and diversity that has always been the bedrock of our company,” Rhoden said in a statement. “‘Dream On’ is an affirmation of the dream Desmond and I had twenty-nine years ago, and the passion, pride, and possibility that have brought us this far and encourage us to keep going.”

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]