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

HIROSHI SUGIMOTO: GATES OF PARADISE

Hiroshi Sugimoto followed the journeys of the Tenshō Embassy through Italy for photographic series (photo by Richard Goodbody)

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Through January 7, $12
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

In his 2005-6 Japan Society exhibition “History of History,” Tokyo-born multidisciplinary artist Hiroshi Sugimoto explored time and spirituality by including his photographic works alongside artifacts from his personal collection dating from the prehistoric era to the fifteenth century. Throughout his career, he has constructed his own professional history by photographing dioramas at natural history museums (“Still Life”), capturing electrical discharges on photographic dry plates (“Lightning Fields”), focusing on the horizon line across the ocean (“Seascapes”), shooting wax figures to look like paintings (“Portraits”), using long exposures to reveal the blinding soul of movie palaces (“Theaters”), and turning one thousand gilded wooden Buddha statues at Sanjῡsangen-dō (Hall of Thirty-Three Bays) in Kyoto into a dizzying film (Sea of Buddha). His latest Japan Society show, “Hiroshi Sugimoto: Gates of Paradise,” on view through January 7 as part of the institution’s 110th anniversary celebration, returns to historical investigation, from a larger cultural perspective rather than a personal one.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, “Pantheon, Rome,” gelatin silver print, 2015 (© Hiroshi Sugimoto)

In 2015, while Sugimoto, who is based in Japan and New York City, was traveling through Italy photographing theaters, he learned of the fascinating story of Mancio Ito, Miguel Chijiwa, Juliao Nakaura, and Martinao Hara, four young Japanese men who were sent to Europe in 1582 to experience Western Christian culture. Known as the Tenshō Embassy, they returned eight years later with much information that influenced Japanese and nanban hybrid art, taught by Jesuit missionaries, which combined Eastern and Western subjects and techniques. Sugimoto decided to follow their journey, taking photographs of landmark structures and artworks the young men most likely saw, including the Pantheon in Rome, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Siena Duomo, the Duomo in Florence, the Villa Farnese, the Pietà by Michelangelo, and the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza. Those works are displayed along with related historical objects that add intriguing context. “Pope Gregory XIII welcomed the four boys because he saw them as renewing the spirit of the three wise men coming from the East to pay homage to the newborn Christ,” Sugimoto explains in his artist statement. “That sense of mutual surprise from over four centuries ago still flows, not quite wholly absorbed, in my bloodstream.”

Hiroshi Sugimoto, “The Last Supper: Acts of God,” gelatin silver print, 1999–2012 (© Hiroshi Sugimoto)

Sugimoto, who will turn seventy this year, produced silver gelatin prints of the places, casting the images in an austere, ghostlike darkness. The hole at the top of the inside of the Pantheon glows with light. The winding staircase at Villa Farnese unfolds in a captivating vertical triptych. The long hallway of the Teatro Olimpico beckons. In its own room, “The Last Supper: Acts of God” features Sugimoto’s more-than-twenty-two-foot-long horizontal photograph of Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic painting; the photo was significantly damaged when Sugimoto’s Chelsea studio was flooded by Hurricane Sandy. However, the destruction lends new meaning to the work, with some sections sharp and distinct, others looking melted and severely scratched — and adding what appears to be a halo around the head of Jesus. “I chose to interpret this as the invisible hand of God coming down to bring my monumental, but unfinished, ‘Last Supper’ to completion,” Sugimoto writes. “Leonardo completed his ‘Last Supper’ over five hundred years ago and it has deteriorated beautifully. I can only be grateful to the storm for putting my work through the same half millennium of stresses in so short a time.” Sugimoto’s photograph is accompanied by a fourteenth-century Japanese bust of Christ’s head that has been badly damaged.

Unidentified artist, “A Portuguese Trading Ship Arrives in Japan,” pair of six-panel folding screens, ink, color, gold, and gold-leaf on paper, early 17th century (Feinberg Collection)

Sugimoto has curated a collection of letters, portraits, scrolls, screens, and other objects that reveals the cross-cultural exchange between Japan and Europe that emerged during the “Christian Century” of the 1500s as missionaries came to the East and converted many Japanese. “A Portuguese Trading Ship Arrives in Japan,” consisting of a pair of early-seventeenth-century six-panel nanban folding screens, uses both European and Japanese techniques to relate the story of the West meeting the East. The details in the individual sections are worth examining at length to explore the architecture, manner of dress, and facial expressions. A bamboo vase, hanging scroll letter, and tea scoop belonging to tea master Sen no Rikyū refers to chanoyu, “the way of tea,” a ritual that was the focus of Sugimoto’s Rikyu-Enoura, an original theatrical production that ran in early November as part of Japan Society’s “NOH NOW” series.

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s “Gates of Paradise” includes a photo of Ghiberti’s rendering of David slaying Goliath (© Hiroshi Sugimoto)

In the final room, Sugimoto debuts his latest series, “Gates of Paradise,” large-scale photographs of the bronze doors created by Lorenzo Ghiberti for the Baptistery of St. John in Florence from 1425 to 1452. Dubbed the “Gates of Paradise” by Michelangelo, the work underwent a major decades-long renovation and was moved to the Opera del Duomo Museum in 2012, where Sugimoto saw them. There are ten pieces from the black-and-white series, gelatin silver prints that give the bronze doors a different, haunting look. Among the subjects are Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Jacob and Esau, Solomon, David, and Joshua, in biblical scenes that sometimes require a bit of entertaining deciphering. (And don’t miss Sugimoto’s “Red and White Plum Blossoms Under Moonlight,” a stunning platinum and palladium print on two screens that he produced in commemoration of the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Japanese artist Ogata Kōrin.) It is an engaging and stimulating conclusion to the exhibit, for which Sugimoto also redesigned Japan Society’s lobby pond and upstairs corner garden, adding a stainless-steel sculpture to each. On January 6 from 6:00 to 9:00, in conjunction with the closing of the show, Japan Society is hosting “Escape East @ 333,” the next edition of its monthly mixer for art enthusiasts, with a viewing of the exhibition, live music from DJ Aki, and sake tastings; admission is free with advance registration.

HUMAN FLOW WITH AI WEIWEI IN PERSON

Ai Weiwei takes a close look at the international refugee crisis in Human Flow

HUMAN FLOW (Ai Weiwei, 2017)
Quad Cinema, 34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves., 212-255-2243, Wednesday, January 3, 4:30
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas, 30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St., 718-636-4100, Wednesday, January 3, 7:00
www.humanflow.com

On January 3, Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei will travel from Manhattan to Brooklyn, participating in two Q&As following screenings of his stunning new documentary, Human Flow. This past fall, Ai had several concurrent exhibitions in New York City that dealt with the international refugee crisis. At Deitch Projects in SoHo, “Laundromat” included racks of clothing that had been worn by Syrian refugees at the Idomeni refugee camp in Iraq, all freshly cleaned and pressed, as if ready to give the migrant men, women, and children a new lease on life. Among other items, the gallery show also featured several monitors playing footage that Ai had shot in various refugee camps, film that has now been turned into Human Flow. In 2016, Ai and his crew traveled to twenty-three countries, visiting dozens of camps in a year in which it was estimated that there were as many as 65 million displaced people around the world, fleeing war, poverty, famine, and persecution. In his first full-length documentary, Ai moves from macro to micro, shooting at a variety of scales. He uses drones to photograph tent cities in the desert from high above — reminiscent of the photography of Edward Burtynsky, turning individual items into parts of a vast pattern — along with gorgeous scenes of deserts and seascapes and intimate cell-phone footage and handheld camera shots that put viewers right in the middle of these makeshift villages, where some families live for decades. Ai, with his scruffy gray beard and in a hoodie, is often shown not only taking cell-phone videos but helping out and mingling with the refugees as dinghies arrive on the shores of Lesbos, Greece, or playfully trading passports with a refugee. Throughout the film, men and women stand proudly, often in traditional dress, looking directly at the camera for extended lengths of time, establishing their unique individuality, putting faces to what is most often seen in news clips as swaths of people struggling to survive. As Ai travels to each successive camp, he posts relevant quotes from writers and philosophers from that nation, from Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, the Dhammapada Buddhist scripture, and Persian poet Baba Tahir to Kurdish poet Sherko Bekas, Syrian poet Adonis, and U.S. president John F. Kennedy. Details about the situations are sometimes delivered news-crawl-style, along the bottom of the screen.

Ai Weiwei gets deeply involved in situation in Human Flow

In addition to giving voice to the refugees themselves — “Where am I supposed to start my new life?” one woman asks — Ai speaks with crisis workers on the ground and United Nations officials and other experts, such as UNHCR Communications Officer Boris Cheshirkov, Princess Dana Firas of Jordan, Human Rights Watch Emergencies Director Peter Bouckaert, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi, UNHCR Pakistan Senior Operation Coordinator Marin Din Kajdomcaj, UNICEF Lebanon representative Tanya Chapuisat, former Syrian astronaut Mohammad Fares, Dr. Cem Terzi of the Association of Bridging Peoples, and Dr. Kemal Kirişci, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who gets right to the point, explaining, “It’s going to be a big challenge to recognize that the world is shrinking, and people from different religions, different cultures, are going to have to learn to live with each other.” The powerful, immersive film was edited by Niels Pagh Andersen, who worked on Joshua Oppenheimer’s searing The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, from nine hundred hours of footage, with a score by Karsten Fundal and a dozen cinematographers, among them Ai, Christopher Doyle, Zhang Zanbo, Konstantinos Koukoulis, and Johannes Waltermann. “The more immune you are to people suffering, that’s very, very dangerous. It’s critical for us to maintain this humanity,” one woman says, and that gets right to the heart of the film. Human Flow is very personal to Ai, whose own battles with Chinese authorities and exile — he spent much of his childhood in a hard labor camp in the Gobi Desert because his father, a poet and intellectual, was part of a revolutionary group, and as an adult Ai has been imprisoned, placed under house arrest, and beaten for his activism — were detailed in the Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry. A masterful Conceptualist whose work explores sociocultural elements through a historical lens, Ai has always believed that artists have a responsibility to reveal the truth, and that’s precisely what he does in Human Flow, with a determined fearlessness to do what’s right.

In one of the film’s most heart-wrenching moments, thirteen thousand refugees, mostly from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, walk through the Greek countryside toward the Macedonian border, only to find that a fence has been erected and the entrance is now closed, leaving them with nowhere to go. It’s a harrowing scene, but Ai is no mere doomsayer. There are many shots in the film that show children running about and playing, laughing and smiling for the camera, still filled with hope for a better life. It’s the rest of the world’s job to make that happen, and as Ai exemplifies, every one of us can make a difference. Ai will participate in Q&As following the 4:30 screening at the Quad as part of the “One Shots” series and after the 7:00 show at BAMcinématek, the latter moderated by Laura Poitras (Citizenfour, Astro Noise). The film was released in conjunction with the Public Art Fund project “Ai Weiwei: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors,” consisting of dozens of installations and interventions in all five boroughs: at Doris C. Freedman Plaza, the Washington Square Arch, the Unisphere, Essex Street Market, the Cooper Union, bus shelters, lampposts, newsstand kiosks, and other locations, furthering Ai’s artistic ideas about immigrant bans and the treatment of refugees, spread across a city he called home in the 1980s.

THE WORLD IS SOUND / SONIC ARCADE: SHAPING SPACE WITH SOUND

Éliane Radigue, Laetitia Sonami, and Bob Bielecki’s “Le Corps Sonore (Sound Body)” winds its way sonically up the Rubin’s spiral staircase (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

THE WORLD IS SOUND
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Wednesday – Monday through January 8, $10-$15 (free Fridays 6:00 – 10:00)
212-620-5000
rubinmuseum.org

Listen up now: There are currently two excellent interactive exhibitions in New York City dedicated to the sound of art, and the art of sound, “The World Is Sound” at the Rubin Museum of Art through January 8 and “Sonic Arcade: Shaping Space with Sound” at the Museum of Arts & Design through February 25. “If you focus your attention, you can hear inside sound, you can hear that there’s more there than just what’s on the surface. I find that kind of listening very meditative. It’s centering,” Bob Bielecki says regarding his contribution to the show at the Rubin, “. . . from a distance,” an audio installation of environmental sounds recorded in India and Nepal. Meanwhile, composer Hildegard Westerkamp, who also uses field recordings from India in her piece, “Into India,” notes, “We respond differently when we begin to listen. It can become almost a revolutionary act.” The Rubin exhibition is divided into Body, Creation, Ritual, Listening, Death & Rebirth, and OM Lab, consisting of more than seventy-five works that also incorporate touch and sight while exploring aspects of Tibetan Buddhism relating to the cycle of samsara. Walking up the spiral staircase, you’ll encounter Éliane Radigue, Laetitia Sonami, and Bielecki’s “Le Corps Sonore (Sound Body),” a site-specific sonic labyrinth that rises from a resonant bowl on the floor and reaches up to the ceiling. If you take the elevator instead, you’ll hear fifteen of the artists discussing the first sounds they can remember and the last sound they expect to hear.

Visitors can immerse themselves in multiple ways in sound exhibit at the Rubin Museum (photo by Filip Wolak)

You need to touch the wall to hear a series of mantras that are paired with related paintings and sculptures from the Rubin collection, including the Manjushri Mantra, the Heart Sutra Mantra, and the Vajrayogini Mantra, while other works are accompanied by chants from monasteries in Nepal and India and a retreat center in upstate New York. In the OM Lab, you can hear a collective OM recorded by museum visitors this past summer, who chanted the seed syllable in a special booth. Christine Sun Kim and John Giorno team up for “Voice” (through January 14), using video, silkscreened text, and abstract, coded poetry in such works as “Words Come from Sounds” and “The Sound of Relevance.” You can hear such instruments as the dung kar (ceremonial conch trumpet), dril bu (bell), dung chen (long horn), and gya ling (oboe) if you get close to them, while you are also invited to lie down on a bench to activate Tibetan funerary text recitations. There are also such videos as Resonant Universe, Daniel Neumann’s Intermediate States, and Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe’s Harmonic Course, which challenge the senses, while you’ll need to put on headphones to check out audio works by Jules Gimbrone, MSHR, Samita Sinha, Nathan Wooley, C. Spencer Yeh, and others. As the wall text advises, “listen with your whole body” if you want to get the full effect of the exhibition, which was curated by Risha Lee to follow the path from creation to death to rebirth. Be adventurous and follow every passageway, as the exhibit is filled with surprises around every corner. And be sure to read the first issue of the Rubin’s Spiral magazine, which delves even further into the world of sound.

Visitors activate MSHR’s “Knotted Gate Presence Weave” by walking under the arches and following the paths (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

SONIC ARCADE: SHAPING SPACE WITH SOUND
Museum of Arts & Design
2 Columbus Circle at 58th St. & Eighth Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 25, $12-$16 (pay-what-you-wish Fridays 6:00 – 9:00)
212-299-7777
madmuseum.org

You can get even more involved at the Museum of Arts & Design’s “Sonic Arcade: Shaping Space with Sound,” which covers several floors as well as the stairwells and the lobby. The show focuses more on technological innovation and visceral pleasure as visitors make their way through a sonic wonderland where their touch and movement activates the works. “I was interested from an early age in the way our realities and surroundings are constructed, the way an experience is defined and placed,” Naama Tsabar says about “Propagation (Opus 3),” a large-scale wall installation that museumgoers can play by plucking vertical piano wires. She adds, “Sound and music were key players in blocking the outside world as well as in taking someone, and their surroundings, on a journey while inducing movements and interactions among humans specific to those places.” Foo/Skou’s “Format 3” takes people on a sonic journey through stairwell B, where they can perform their own score by touching sculptural squares, circles, and triangles that represent earth, water, and fire. MSHR’s “Knotted Gate Presence Weave” is a cybernetic musical composition consisting of futuristic digital-logic archways that are activated as you move through its mazelike structure, sound and light rattling through the purple space. Visitors are encouraged to remove their shoes and enjoy Studio PSK’s “Polyphonic Playground,” in which children and adults can climb ladderlike objects and ride on swings that respond to touch and movement by emitting musical sounds. One of the artists-in-residence, Stephanie Acosta, NIC Kay, or Steven Reker, is often there to perform and answer questions about the project; there will also be a guided “play time” most Thursdays at 5:00.

Naama Tsabar’s “Propagation (Opus 3)” offers museumgoers the chance to form their own electronic string band (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

You’ll have to pick up a transistor radio and headphone at the front desk to experience Anna Friz’s “Echophone,” one of several works curated by Jeff Kolar and his experimental radio broadcast platform known as Radius. Curator Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe’s “Subject to Gesture” brings together interactive hand-built analog synthesizers by Emily Counts, Make Noise, and others that people can play by twisting knobs, pushing objects, and filling out a card. Julianne Swartz was inspired by the Buddhist singing bowl in creating “Sine Body,” a table occupied by translucent abstract vessels made of acoustically reflective ceramic and glass that use electronic feedback and air to emit sound with a mallet. And Christie Wright and Arjen Noordeman’s “Audiowear” display features jewelry that acts like idiophone and aerophone instruments; the necklaces and bracelets are joined by videos showing the pieces being used in concerts. In addition, Deborah Stratman’s “Hearsay” and “Siege” can be heard in the Turnstyle Underground Market in the 59th St. – Columbus Circle subway station the first seven minutes of every hour on weekdays except 8:00 – 10:00 am and 5:00 – 7:00 pm. Together, “The World Is Sound” at the Rubin and “Sonic Arcade” at MAD offer visitors the opportunity to reevaluate the potential of sound both as inner healing and pure sensory pleasure.

44th ANNUAL NEW YEAR’S DAY MARATHON BENEFIT READING

marathon benefit reading 2018

Who: The Poetry Project
What: Forty-fourth annual New Year’s Day Marathon Benefit Reading
Where: The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, 131 East Tenth St., 212-674-0910
When: Monday, January 1, $25, 2:00 pm
Why: More than 150 writers, musicians, actors, dancers, and other artists will take the podium in this annual benefit for the Poetry Project, which “promotes, fosters, and inspires the reading and writing of contemporary poetry by (a) presenting contemporary poetry to diverse audiences, (b) increasing public recognition, awareness, and appreciation of poetry and other arts, (c) providing a community setting in which poets and artists can exchange ideas and information, and (d) encouraging the participation and development of new poets from a broad range of styles.” This year’s forty-fourth annual marathon boasts another fab lineup to welcome in the new year, including Andrei Codrescu, Anne Waldman and Fast Speaking Music, Anselm Berrigan, Bob Holman, Bob Rosenthal, CAConrad, DJ Ashtrae, Ed Askew Band, Edgar Oliver, Edmund Berrigan, Edwin Torres, Eileen Myles, Elliott Sharp, Erica Hunt & Marty Ehrlich, erica kaufman, Ernie Brooks w/Peter Zummo & Jeannine Otis, Jennifer Monson, John Giorno, Jonas Mekas, Joseph Keckler, LaTasha Diggs, Laura Ortman, Lee Ranaldo, Leila Ortiz, Lenny Kaye, Lucy Ives & Lara Mimosa Montes, Lydia Cortes, M. Lamar, Marcella Durand, Martha Wilson, Matt Longabucco, Nicole Wallace, Penny Arcade, Ubu Sings Ubu, Pierre Joris & Nicole Peyrafitte, Precious Okoyomon, Rachel Levitsky, Rachel Valinsky, Sarah Schulman, Shelby Cook, Steve Cannon, Steve Earle, Steven Taylor & Douglas Dunn, Tammy Faye Starlite, Ted Dodson, the Double Yews, Todd Colby, Tom Savage, Tony Towle, Tracie Morris, Washington Squares, Yoshiko Chuma, Yvonne Meier, and Yvonne Rainer, among many others.

LIGHT AFTER DARKNESS: MEMORY, RESILIENCE, AND RENEWAL IN CAMBODIA

Loung Ung and Angelina Jolie in Cambodia.

Loung Ung and Angelina Jolie, seen above in Cambodia collaborating on film project, will be at Asia Society on December 14 for panel discussion (photo courtesy of Netflix)

Who: Angelina Jolie, Rithy Panh, Phloeun Prim, Loung Ung, Darren Walker
What: Panel discussion on the journey of resilience experienced by the Cambodian people and documented by artists in the post-Khmer Rouge era
Where: Asia Society, 725 Park Ave. at 70th St., 212-288-6400
When: Thursday, December 14, $25, 5:00
Why: In conjunction with the outstanding Asia Society exhibition “After Darkness: Southeast Asian Art in the Wake of History” and the U.S. premiere of Him Sophy and Rithy Panh’s Bangsokol: a Requiem for Cambodia at BAM, Asia Society is hosting “Light after Darkness: Memory, Resilience, and Renewal in Cambodia,” a panel discussion on December 14 with American actress, filmmaker, and Special Envoy to UN High Commissioner for Refugees Angelina Jolie, Cambodian director Panh (The Missing Picture), Cambodian Living Arts executive director Phloeun Pri, and memoirist and screenwriter Loung Ung (First They Killed My Father, which was directed by Jolie), moderated by Ford Foundation president Darren Walker. “Some have said that poetry after atrocity is not possible anymore, yet we need to have it. We must continue to create. We can’t start mourning without knowing how, and part of knowing how is to accept something very painful, something unexplainable. This art may bring us answers, help us accept our pain and loss. Yet, it is more than an act of remembrance; it’s an act of transmission and brings humanization,” Panh says about Bangsokol.

PRIME LOIS SMITH

Lois Smith will be at the Quad this week for a celebration of her long career, including her acclaimed performance in Marjorie Prime

Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
December 12-14
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com

Topeka-born stage and screen actress Lois Smith will be at the Quad this week to celebrate her seven-decade career, which has featured such plays as The Grapes of Wrath, The Trip to Bountiful, Buried Child, and John, earning two Tony nominations and an Obie, and such films as East of Eden; Foxes; Five Easy Pieces; Next Stop, Greenwich Village; and this year’s Marjorie Prime and Lady Bird. Five of those films, with the exception of Lady Bird, make up the Quad series “Prime Lois Smith,” running December 12–14, with Smith either introducing or taking part in Q&As for every screening but one. Among the television programs she’s had recurring roles on are Desperate Housewives, True Blood, ER, and Grace and Frankie. Smith, who was on the November 21, 1955, cover of Life magazine with Judy Tyler, Jayne Mansfield, Susan Strasberg, and Diane Cilento, is still going strong at the age of eighty-seven, with more work on the horizon.

Cal Trask (James Dean) and Anne (Lois Smith) share a tender moment in Elia Kazan’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden

EAST OF EDEN (Elia Kazan, 1955)
Tuesday, December 12, 6:30
quadcinema.com

“I guess there’s just a certain amount of good and bad you get from your parents and I just got the bad,” Cal (James Dean) says in Elia Kazan’s cinematic adaptation of part of John Steinbeck’s 1952 novel, East of Eden, a modern retelling of the biblical Cain and Abel story. In his first starring role, Dean received a posthumous Oscar nomination for his moody, angst-ridden performance as Cal Trask, a troubled young man who discovers that the mother (Best Supporting Actress winner Jo Van Fleet) he thought was dead is actually alive and well and running a successful house of prostitution nearby. Cal tries to win his father’s (Raymond Massey as Adam Trask) love and acceptance any way he can, including helping him develop his grand plan to transport lettuce from their farm via refrigerated railway cars, but his father seems to always favor his other son, Aron (Richard Davalos). Aron, meanwhile, is in love with Abra (Julie Harris), a sweet young woman who takes a serious interest in Cal and desperately wants him to succeed. But the well-meaning though misunderstood Cal does things his own way, which gets him in trouble with his father and brother, the mother who wants nothing to do with him, the sheriff (Burl Ives), and just about everyone else he comes in contact with.

Set in Monterey and Salinas, East of Eden begins with a grand overture by Leonard Rosenman, announcing the film is going to be a major undertaking, and it lives up to its billing. Dean is masterful as Cal, peppering Paul Osborn’s script with powerful improvisational moments as he expresses his frustration with his family and life in general. His inner turmoil threatens to explode in both word and gesture as he just seeks to be loved. Dean would follow up East of Eden with seminal roles in Rebel Without a Cause and Giant before his death in a car crash in 1955 at the age of twenty-four, leaving behind a remarkable legacy that has influenced generations of actors ever since. Lois Smith makes her film debut as Anne, the young woman who works at the brothel and is charmed by Cal in a steamy scene. Smith will be on hand for a Q&A following the December 12 screening of the film at the Quad as part of the series “Prime Lois Smith.”

Lois Smith plays the sister of prodigal son (Jack Nicholson) in Five Easy Pieces

Lois Smith plays the sister of prodigal son Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson) in Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces

FIVE EASY PIECES (Bob Rafelson, 1970)
Wednesday, December 13, 6:30
Thursday, December 14, 9:10
quadcinema.com

A key film that helped lead 1960s cinema into the grittier 1970s, Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces is one of the most American of dramas, a tale of ennui and unrest among the rich and the poor, a road movie that travels from trailer parks to fashionable country estates. Caught in between is Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson), a former piano prodigy now working on an oil rig and living with a well-meaning but not very bright waitress, Rayette (Karen Black). When Bobby finds out that his father is ill, he reluctantly returns to the family home, the prodigal son who had left all that behind, escaping to a less-complicated though unsatisfying life putting his fingers in a bowling ball rather than tickling the keys of a grand piano. Back in his old house, he has to deal with his brother, Carl (Ralph Waite), a onetime violinist who can no longer play because of an injured neck and who serves as the film’s comic relief; Carl’s wife, Catherine (Susan Anspach), a snooty woman Bobby has always been attracted to; and Bobby’s sister, Partita (Lois Smith), a lonely, troubled soul who has the hots for Spicer (John Ryan), the live-in nurse who takes care of their wheelchair-bound father (William Challee).

Jack Nicholson, sitting next to Karen Black, is about to place the most famous sandwich order in film history

Rafelson had previously directed the psychedelic movie Head (he cocreated the Monkees band and TV show) and would go on to make such films as The King of Marvin Gardens, Stay Hungry, and Black Widow; written by Carole Eastman, Five Easy Pieces fits flawlessly in between them, a deeply philosophical work that captures the myriad changes the country was experiencing as the Woodstock Generation was forced to start growing up. The film suffers from some unsteady editing primarily in the earlier scenes, but it is still a gem, featuring at least two unforgettable scenes, one that takes place in a California highway traffic jam and the other in a diner, where Bobby places an order for the ages. And as good as both Nicholson, who earned the first of seven Best Actor Oscar nominations, and Black, who was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, are, Helena Kallianiotes nearly steals the picture as a crazy woman railing against the ills of the world from the backseat of Bobby’s car. Five Easy Pieces is screening December 13 and 14 in the Quad series “Prime Lois Smith,” with Smith taking part in a Q&A following the 6:30 screening on the 13th.

ACTOR’S CHOICE — LAMBERT WILSON & YVES MONTAND: Z

The Deputy (Yves Montand, rear left) is on his way to a fateful encounter in Costa-Gavras’s Z

CINÉSALON: Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, December 12, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through December 19
212-355-6100
fiaf.org

In her new book Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes (Columbia University Press, $20, November 2017), Columbia professor and film historian Annette Insdorf writes that the beginning moments of Costa-Gavras’s masterful 1969 political thriller, Z, “places us metaphorically in the perspective of the investigator even before we meet him: we must be attentive to detail, skeptical, and then capable of seeing the larger picture. Given the film’s incorporation of flashbacks as well, Z builds a cumulative sense of inevitability that the truth will emerge.” Insdorf will be at FIAF on December 12 to sign copies of her book and introduce the 7:30 screening of Z, which is part of the CinéSalon series “Actor’s Choice: Lambert Wilson & Yves Montand,” curated by French actor and singer Wilson. (The film will also be shown at 4:00; both screenings will be followed by a wine reception.) The Algerian-French coproduction was adapted by Costa-Gavras and Jorge Semprún from Vassilis Vassilikos’s novel, a fictionalized account of the 1963 assassination of Greek left-wing antiwar activist Grigoris Lambrakis and the government cover-up that tried to make it look like an unavoidable accident. “Any similarity to real persons and events is not coincidental. It is intentional,” the credits explain. The film opens with rapid cuts of military and religious medals before zeroing in on a meeting in which the General (Pierre Dux) tells fellow law enforcement and governmental figures that they must eradicate the “ideological mildew,” referring to left-wing activists and, specifically, a deputy (Montand), based on Lambrakis, who is scheduled to speak at a large rally. After a violent incident, the Magistrate (Jean-Louis Trintignant) starts interviewing participants and witnesses and refuses to give up even when the General, the Colonel (Julien Guiomar), and other important figures threaten him as he seeks the truth, which doesn’t matter at all to those in power, who feel they understand the larger scheme of things. The Magistrate is helped by a photojournalist (producer Jacques Perrin) who is not afraid of asking penetrating questions and secretly snapping pictures. As the lies build, the truth slowly emerges, but that doesn’t mean the violence is over.

The Magistrate (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is intent on getting to the bottom of a government cover-up in classic political thriller

Costa-Gavras, a Greek expat who lives and works in France, has made many political films in his long career (State of Siege, L’Aveu, Missing, Amen.), influenced by his father, who was part of the anti-Nazi Greek resistance and was later imprisoned by Greece for being a Communist. Z might ostensibly be based on specific events, but unfortunately it’s a universal story that could take place just about anywhere in a world that has lost such leaders as Martin Luther King Jr., the Kennedy brothers, Yitzhak Rabin, Anwar Sadat, Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X, and others to assassination. The film, which is in French, never reveals where it is set, and most of the characters are not named, instead identified by their jobs: the deputy, the colonel, the general, the magistrate, etc. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard, best known for his work with Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Philippe Garrel, shoots the film in a cinéma-vérité style, favoring handheld cameras (he also plays the English surgeon); Françoise Bonnot’s editing keeps building the tension while flirting with documentary-like elements; and Mikis Theodorakis’s lively score complements the action with energy and fervor. There’s also a huge dose of sly humor bordering on farce throughout. The film is particularly relevant in America, where terms such as “fake news” and “truthiness” have taken hold and the forty-fifth president has repeatedly called for and/or condoned violence against his opponents, his rivals’ supporters, and the free press. The title refers to the French word “Zei,” which means “He lives!” a phrase used by protestors; when the military took over Greece in 1967, it banned the use of the letter “Z” on placards and graffiti, along with many other things, which are listed over the closing credits. “Z” was nominated for five Oscars — Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, Best Editing, and Best Foreign Language Film, winning the latter two; it was the first film to be nominated for both Best Picture and Best Foreign Language Film. In addition, Trintignant (Amour, The Conformist, A Man and a Woman) was named Best Actor at Cannes. “Actor’s Choice” concludes December 19 with Jérôme Salle’s The Odyssey, with Lambert Wilson, Pierre Niney, and Audrey Tatou.