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

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.

SPECIAL SCREENING: THE MISSING PICTURE

Director Rithy Panh uses dioramas to fill in the gaps in Oscar-nominated The Missing Picture

THE MISSING PICTURE (L’IMAGE MANQUANTE) (Rithy Panh, 2013)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Tuesday, December 12, $15, 7:00
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.themissingpicture.bophana.org

In conjunction with the December 15-16 U.S. premiere of Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia as part of the 2017 Next Wave Festival, BAM is presenting Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture on December 12 at 7:00, with Panh participating in a postscreening Q&A with Ford Foundation program officer Chi-hui Yang. Winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes and nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award, The Missing Picture is a brilliantly rendered look back at the director’s childhood in Cambodia just as Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge began their reign of terror in the mid-1970s. “I seek my childhood like a lost picture, or rather it seeks me,” narrator Randal Douc says in French, reciting darkly poetic and intimately personal text written by author Christophe Bataille (Annam) based on Panh’s life. Born in Phnom Penh in 1964, Panh, who has made such previous documentaries about his native country as S21, The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell and wrote the 2012 book L’élimination with Bataille, was faced with a major challenge in telling his story; although he found remarkable archival footage of the communist Angkar regime, there are precious few photographs or home movies of his family and the community where he grew up. So he had sculptor Sarith Mang hand-carve and paint wooden figurines that Panh placed in dioramas to detail what happened to his friends, relatives, and neighbors. Panh’s camera hovers over and zooms into the dioramas, bringing these people, who exist primarily only in memory, to vivid life. When a person disappears, Panh depicts their carved representatives flying through the sky, as if finally achieving freedom amid all the horrors.

He delves into the Angkar’s propaganda movement and sloganeering — the “great leap forward,” spread through film and other methods — as the rulers sent young men and women into forced labor camps. “With film too, the harvests are glorious,” Douc states as women are shown, in black-and-white, working in the fields. “There is grain. There are the calm, determined faces. Like a painting. A poem. At last I see the Revolution they so promised us. It exists only on film.” It’s a stark comparison to cinematographer Prum Mésa’s modern-day shots of the wind blowing through lush green fields, devoid of people. The Missing Picture is an extraordinarily poignant memoir that uses the director’s personal tale as a microcosm for what happened in Cambodia during the 1970s, employing the figures and dioramas to compensate for “the missing pictures.” Like such other documentaries as Jessica Wu’s Protagonist and In the Realms of the Unreal, Michel Gondry’s Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, Jeff Malmberg’s Marwencol, and Zachary Heinzerling’s Cutie and the Boxer, which incorporate animation, puppetry, and/or miniatures to enhance the narrative or fill in gaps, Panh makes creative use of an unexpected artistic technique, this time concentrating on painful history as well as personal and collective memory.

RIALTO PICTURES — 20 FILMS FOR 20 YEARS: THE FALLEN IDOL

Phile (Bobby Henrey) is trapped in a web of lies and betrayal in The Fallen Idol

THE FALLEN IDOL (Carol Reed, 1948)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, December 9, $15 (includes same-day museum admission), 3:00
Series continues through December 29
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
www.rialtopictures.com

Through much of Carol Reed’s classic 1948 thriller, The Fallen Idol, you’ll be begging for poor little rich boy Phile, played by newcomer Bobby Henrey, to keep his mouth shut, whether he’s lying or desperately trying to tell the truth to nearly every adult around him. But what is the truth? That is the mind-spinning question that cinema has provoked since a train headed down the tracks at an audience and every editor’s cut altered a story. On December 9, Henrey, who made only one other film, Karl Hartl’s 1951 Wonder Boy, before becoming an accountant and deacon, will be at the Museum of the Moving Image, telling the truth about his memories of the role and his life to longtime Film Forum repertory programmer extraordinaire Bruce Goldstein after the 3:00 screening of the film as part of the series “Rialto Pictures: 20 Films for 20 Years.” The first of three collaborations between Reed and Graham Greene — it would be followed the next year by The Third Man and in 1959 by Our Man in Havana — The Fallen Idol, adapted by Greene from his short story “The Basement Room,” is set in London, where eight-year-old Philippe, known as Phile, lives in a mansion with his rarely present parents, the French ambassador (Gerard Heinz) and his ill wife. He is ostensibly being raised by the erudite butler, Baines (Ralph Richardson, in one of his most elegant and nuanced performances). Baines, who plays games with Phile and takes him on walks through the park, is married to a nasty, shrewish woman (Sonia Dresdel) who runs the large household with a cold iron fist. When Phile espies Baines with another woman, Julie (Michèle Morgan), the boy, not fully understanding the lovers’ relationship, agrees not to say anything about it to Mrs. Baines. But she eventually finds out what is going on, leading to a tragedy that Phile misinterprets, thinking that he witnessed a murder. He wants someone, anyone, to listen to him, from doctors to policemen, not knowing that what he has to say could lead to the wrongful imprisonment of his beloved Baines. The ending is a doozy, taking the old axiom “Children should be seen and not heard” to a whole new level.

Baines (Ralph Richardson) has a secret that leads to tragedy in classic Carol Reed / Graham Greene collaboration

Nominated for Oscars for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, The Fallen Idol is a gripping, complex film that questions what we think we see, onscreen and in real life, with sharp editing by Oswald Hafenrichter that relates directly to how Phile views his surroundings, especially the vast, often threatening embassy with its haunting spiral staircase. Phile is often shot behind railings and gates, as if imprisoned, not yet ready for the adult world, which is bathed in shadowy chiaroscuro by cinematographer Georges Périnal. Henrey is a natural as the boy, innocently grabbing cockatoos’ tails at the zoo, asking for an extra pastry at a café, and petting his beloved pet snake, McGregor. Everything is a learning experience for him; there’s nothing he doesn’t want to touch, to know more about, wide-eyed innocence laced with a hint of suspicion. Henrey was the only child interviewed for the role; Reed spotted him in a jacket photo of a book by his mother, a well-respected author who initially wrote under her husband’s name. Despite the changes Reed made to the original story, Greene, the master of moral subtlety, called Reed “the only director I know with that particular warmth of human sympathy, the extraordinary feeling of the right face for the right part, the exactitude of cutting, and not least important the power of sympathizing with an author’s worries and ability to guide him.” Human sympathy is evident in nearly every shot of The Fallen Idol, as a boy attempts to find his place in a world that is not ready to accept him as anything more than a silly child. “Rialto Pictures: 20 Films for 20 Years” continues through December 29 with such other fab pictures as Robert Hamer’s It Always Rains on Sunday, Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour, introduced by Annette Insdorf, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburge’s Tales of Hoffmann, and Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, with Whitman on hand to discuss the film.

NOH-NOW: HANJO

SITI Company presents a new adaptation of Yukio Mishima’s Hanjo at Japan Society

Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
December 7-9, $35, 7:30
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org
siti.org

Japan Society’s four-part “NOH-NOW” series, which began with Luca Veggetti’s Left-Right-Left and Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Rikyu-Enoura, continues with SITI Company’s adaptation of Yukio Mishima’s Hanjo, running December 7-9. (SITI presented a staged reading of Hanjo at Japan Society in May 2007.) Freely adapted by Japanese author, poet, and filmmaker Mishima (The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, Madame de Sade) from Seami Motokiyo’s fourteenth-century noh play about love and betrayal, the work features three characters, the mad girl Hanako, the spinster Jitsuko, and a young man, Yoshio, performed in rotation through three iterations by Akiko Aizawa (who just appeared in Ripe Time’s adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s Sleep at BAM), Gian-Murray Gianino, and Stephen Duff Webber. Leon Ingulsrud directs the bilingual production from his translation, with live music composed and played by violist Christian Frederickson, sets and lighting by Brian H Scott, costumes by Mariko Ohigashi, and choreography by Wendell Beavers. Founded by Anne Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki in 1992, the company has previously staged such inventive works as Chess Match No. 5, bobrauschenbergamerica, Steel Hammer, and Bob and, in its early years, were regulars at the Toga Festival in Japan. The December 7 show at Japan Society will be followed by a reception with members of the company, while the December 8 performance will be followed by a Q&A with the artists. “NOH-NOW” concludes January 11-14 with Satoshi Miyagi’s Mugen Noh Othello as part of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival.

THE NON-ACTOR: PUTTY HILL

Matt Porterfield directs the cast in a scene from PUTTY HILL

Matt Porterfield directs a cast of mostly nonprofessional actors in a scene from Putty Hill

PUTTY HILL (Matt Porterfield, 2010)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Francesca Beale Theater
144 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Thursday, December 7, 6:30
Series runs November 24 – December 10
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org

The city of Baltimore has not exactly been depicted kindly in film and on television, with such series as Homicide: Life on the Street, The Wire, and The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood focusing on the rash of drugs and violence that have devastated the community, while native son John Waters has shown its wackier side in such films as Polyester and Hairspray. Born and raised in a suburb just inside the Baltimore city line, writer-director Matt Porterfield (Hamilton, I Used to Be Darker) has taken a different view in his second feature film, Putty Hill. When financing for his coming-of-age drama Metal Gods fell through, he decided to keep the cast and crew together and instead shoot a cinéma verité story about the after-effects of a young man’s drug overdose on a tight-knit community inspired by the one he grew up in. Not much is revealed about Cory as his funeral nears and life goes on, with his younger brother, Cody (Cody Ray), playing paintball with Cory’s friends; his uncle, Spike (Charles Sauers), tattooing customers in his apartment; and Spike’s daughter, Jenny (Sky Ferreira), returning to her hometown for the first time in several years and hanging out with her old friends like nothing much has changed. Working off a five-page treatment with only one line of scripted dialogue, Porterfield and cinematographer Jeremy Saulnier capture people just going on living, taking Cory’s death in stride; Porterfield interviews much of the cast, who share their thoughts and feelings in relatively unemotional ways. Shot on a minuscule budget in only twelve days, Putty Hill uses natural sound and light, nonprofessional actors, and real locations, enhancing its documentary-like feel, maintaining its understated narrative and avoiding any bombastic or sudden, big revelations. It’s a softly moving film, a tender tale about daily life in a contemporary American working-class neighborhood. Putty Hill is screening December 7 at 6:30 in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “The Non-Actor”; it will be introduced by Porterfield and preceded by Laida Lertxundi’s Cry When It Happens. The series continues through December 10 with such other films as Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World, Susumu Hani’s Furyo shonen, Spencer Williams’s The Blood of Jesus, and Peter Watkins’s Punishment Park.

DoublePlus: DR. MIQUE’L DANGELI & MIKE DANGELI + MARIA HUPFIELD

Photos: Dr. Mique’l Dangeli & Mike Dangeli by Thosh Collins

Dr. Mique’l Dangeli & Mike Dangeli will present new work curated by Emily Johnson for Gibney Dance DoublePlus series (photo by Thosh Collins)

Gibney Dance Performing Arts Center, Studio H
280 Broadway between Chambers & Reade Sts.
December 7-9, $15, 8:00
Series continues through December 16
gibneydance.org

Gibney Dance’s annual DoublePlus program, in which established artists mentor pairs of emerging choreographers, continues this week with one of New York City’s most original and innovative creators, Emily Johnson, curating pieces by Dr. Mique’l Dangeli & Mike Dangeli and Maria Hupfield. “I am thrilled to present three artists working a futurity embedded within relationships of language, land, and present action,” Johnson (Niicugni, Shore, The Thank-You Bar) explains in a statement. “Maria Hupfield is Anishinaabe and a member of Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario. Hupfield works with performance and sculpture. Her hand-sewn creations function as tools carried on the body—tracking rhythms, identifying areas (within body, within culture, within life) that warrant open communication, protection, or both. She works the reflection of sight, sound, and object to generate the unexpected — to shift meaning. Dr. Mique’l Dangeli is of the Tsimshian Nation of Metlakatla, Alaska. Mike Dangeli is of the Nisga’a, Tlingit, Tsetsaut, and Tsimshian Nations. Since 1999, Mique’l Dangeli and Mike Dangeli have led Git Hayetsk, an internationally renowned dance group specializing in ancient and newly created songs and mask dances. Through their work they have focused on Northwest Coast First Nations and Alaska Native visual and performing arts, protocol, politics, sovereignty, language revitalization, and decolonization.” Dr. Mique’l Dangeli & Mike Dangeli will present Where do you speak from? Locating languages in the body, land, and waterways, while Hupfield will present Electric Prop and Hum Freestyle Variations. This past summer, Johnson, who always pushes the limits of performance and interactivity, curated Then a Cunning Voice and a Night We Spent Gazing at Stars, a unique, wide-ranging, participatory overnight program on Randall’s Island, so it should be fascinating to see what she has come up with for this DoublePlus show. DoublePlus concludes December 14-16 with Dean Moss curating works by Wesley Chavis + Cori Olinghouse.

A ROOM IN INDIA

Ariane Mnouchkine and Théâtre du Soleil return to Park Ave. Armory with the epic A Room in India

UNE CHAMBRE EN INDE
Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
December 5-20, $45-$150
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org
www.theatre-du-soleil.fr

In 2009, Ariane Mnouchkine and Théâtre du Soleil staged the epic Les Éphémères at Park Ave. Armory as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, asking the question “What would you do if the end of the world were imminent?” Mnouchkine and her avant-garde collective now return to the armory with the North American premiere of their latest epic, A Room in India, exploring the question “What is the role of theater and art in a world dominated by terrorism and hostility?” Directed by Mnouchkine with music by Jean-Jacques Lemêtre and Hélène Cixous and featuring a cast of thirty-five actors from around the world, the spectacle, performed in French, English, Tamil, Arabic, Japanese, and Russian (with English supertitles), explores Eastern and Western traditions as a French theater company is stranded in India and chaos descends in the form of contemporary sociopolitical issues. The production is three hours and fifty-five minutes with one intermission; to get in the mood, the armory is offering a preshow Indian meal ($30; must be ordered at least two days in advance), by chef Gaurav Anand of Moti Mahal Delux, that includes Paneer Tikka Masala, Dal Tadka, and Aloo Dum, rice, bread, naan, Indian pastries, and beer, wine, and water. On December 8 at 6:00, Mnouchkine will participate in an artist talk with Tony Kushner and New Yorker editor David Remnick. In a letter about the show, Théâtre du Soleil stirs up curiosity with a playful conversation:

“So, you’re going to put on another play about India?”

“It won’t be about India but rather will take place in India. In a room in India. That’s even the title of the play.”

“Come again? What do you mean? What happens in an India that’s not India?”

“Visions, dreams, nightmares, apparitions, moments of panic, doubts, revelations. Anything and everything that might haunt the actors and technicians of a poor theater troupe desperately in search of resolutely contemporary, political theater, a troupe stranded there by deeply moving events beyond its control, just as they are beyond our control and move us, leaving us looking for a way to face them, a way to suffer through them without resigning ourselves to adding evil to Evil through our words and our deeds.”

“And so what?”

“For now, that’s it, which is already quite a lot.”