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

A CONVERSATION WITH YVONNE RAINER AND LYNNE TILLMAN

Yvonne Rainer will be at the Film Society of Lincoln Center for a comprehensive retrospective of her work in cinema

Yvonne Rainer will be at the Film Society of Lincoln Center for a comprehensive retrospective of her work in cinema

TALKING PICTURES: THE CINEMA OF YVONNE RAINER
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Amphitheater, Francesca Beale Theater
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Monday, July 24, free, 7:00
Series runs July 21-27
212-875-5232
www.filmlinc.org

In 1965, Yvonne Rainer wrote the “No Manifesto,” publicly saying no to “spectacle, virtuosity, transformations and magic and make-believe, the glamour and transcendency of the star image, the heroic, the anti-heroic, trash imagery, involvement of performer or spectator, style, camp, seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer, eccentricity, and moving or being moved.” It will be difficult, if not impossible, for audiences to maintain many of those ideals when the legendary eighty-two-year-old dancer, choreographer, actor, director, performance artist, and writer comes to the Film Society of Lincoln Center for a week-long celebration of her celluloid career. “Talking Pictures: The Cinema of Yvonne Rainer” runs July 21-27 at the Francesca Beale Theater, with shorts and features made by and/or starring Rainer, along with works that inspired and influenced her. The roster includes Rainer’s Lives of Performers, Film About a Woman Who . . . , Journeys from Berlin/1971, The Man Who Envied Women, and Privilege, among others, along with her collaborations with Maya Deren, Hollis Frampton, and Charles Atlas (who will introduce Trio A/Rainer Variations) in addition to Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, Andy Warhol’s Paul Swan, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Naked Spaces — Living Is Round, and Ulrike Ottinger’s Madame X: An Absolute Ruler. On July 24 at 7:00, the California-born Rainer will sit down with novelist, cultural critic, and Woodmere native Lynne Tillman (Haunted Houses, What Would Lynne Tillman Do?) in the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Amphitheater in a discussion focusing on Rainer’s film career; admission is free and first-come, first-served. It’s a real treat to see Rainer’s work and to listen to her in person, so don’t miss this very special opportunity.

ENDLESS POETRY

Alejandro Jodorowsky guides his younger self (Adan Jodorowsky) through Endless Poetry

Alejandro Jodorowsky guides his younger self (Adan Jodorowsky, his real-life son) through Endless Poetry

ENDLESS POETRY (POESIA SIN FIN) (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 2016)
Landmark Sunshine Cinema
143 East Houston St. between First & Second Aves.
Opens Friday, July 14
212-330-8182
www.landmarktheatres.com
www.endlesspoetrythemovie.com

Eccentric auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky, the mastermind behind such midnight-movie classics as 1971’s El Topo and 1973’s The Holy Mountain, once again turns his magical realist eye on his own life as a young poet in Chile in the 1940s in Endless Poetry, picking up where he left off in the autobiographical saga he began in 2013’s The Dance of Reality, his first film in more than two decades. Starting with his family’s departure from the village of Tocopilla for the big city of Santiago, where Jodorowsky’s father, Jaime (Brontis Jodorowsky), opened a clothing shop, the film quickly dispenses with any pretense of realist narrative as it explodes into a phantasmagoric bildungsroman, shot in eye-popping color by master Hong Kong cinematographer Christopher Doyle (In the Mood for Love, Last Life in the Universe). With one son, Brontis, playing his father; another son, musician Adan, playing Alejandro as a young man (he also composed the score); his grandson, Jeremías Herskovits, portraying him as a boy (Alejandrito); and occasional appearances by himself as . . . himself, interacting with his onscreen/offscreen family, Alejandro mixes time, space, and storytelling with a strong dose of the psychotherapeutic and shamanic blend he calls Psychomagic. To further the incestuous casting, Sara, his mother, and Stella Díaz Varín, his muse and lover, are played by the same actress, opera singer Pamela Flores, while his circle of friends, most of whom went on to become respected poets (Leandro Taub as the wild and crazy Enrique Lihn, Flores as Diaz Varín, Felipe Rios as Nicanor Parra), clowns, near-döppelgangers, little people (Julia Avendaño is a stand-out as Pequeñita), masked skeletons and devils, sex and nudity, and exuberant tarot card readers tumble off the screen in this disturbing, often surreal, but somehow endearing and engaging tale of the artist as a young man, searching for the meaning of his life as well as life in general.

endless poetry 2

Reminiscent of Federico Fellini’s semiautobiographical Oscar-winning Amarcord, Endless Poetryis one of Jodorowsky’s most approachable works, centering on the familiar Romantic struggle of a young male artist coming-of-age against his petit bourgeois family and oppressive society, represented here by the rise of real-life dictator Carlos Ibáñez del Campo (Bastián Bodenhofer). A sly sense of humor and fondness for his youthful follies and friends brighten the proceedings, as does the spectacular production design by Alejandro himself. The final scenes of young Jodorowsky’s departure for Paris demonstrate that this old master still has the power to move an audience with strange and beautiful images that shock and unsettle — especially if one knows exactly how intertwined the relationships of the actors are with the characters they play. Endless Poetry opens July 14 at the Landmark Sunshine, with Alejandro participating in Q&As after the 7:00 show and before the 10:00 show on opening night and with Adan following the 7:00 show on July 15.

50 YEARS OF MIXED-UP FILES

mixed up files 2

METCELEBRATES
Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Saturday, July 15, free with museum admission, 11:00 am – 3:00 pm
212-570-3949
www.metmuseum.org
www.simonandschuster.com

“Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away. That is, running away in the heat of anger with a knapsack on her back. She didn’t like discomfort; even picnics were untidy and inconvenient: all those insects and the sun melting the icing on the cupcakes. Therefore, she decided that leaving home would not be just running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere. To a large place, a comfortable place, an indoor place, and preferably a beautiful place. And that’s why she decided upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.” So begins E. L. Konigsburg’s classic children’s book, From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, which is celebrating its golden anniversary this year. The Met itself is joining in the fun, hosting “50 Years of Mixed-up Files,” a special afternoon honoring the Newbery Medal–winning book about Claudia, her brother Jamie, and their imaginative adventures throughout the museum. On July 15 from 11:00 am to 3:00 pm, there will be hour-long Art Trek tours at 11:00 and 2:00 for children ages seven to eleven, stopping at works and galleries mentioned in the book, including the “marble sarcophagus with garlands and the myth of Theseus and Ariadne” (ca. 130-150 AD) and George Jacobs’s ca. 1782-83 “tester bed (lit à la duchesse en impériale)”; a social media scavenger hunt (#MixedUpMetContest) in which kids try to find five of ten specific works of art (including “Cat Statuette intended to contain a mummified cat,” “Pectoral and Necklace of Sithathoryunet with the Name of Senwosret II,” and an armchair made for Marie Antoinette) and post the photos on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter; re-create the cover of the book at a selfie station on the Met’s front steps; and purchase a limited-edition Mixed-up Files cookie in the American Wing Café. In addition, four artists have been invited to create their own versions of works of art from the book to display in the galleries. Perhaps you’ll even encounter the ghost of Ms. Konigsburg, who, in the mid-1960s, would teach classes at the Met while her three children wandered around the museum.

RUBIN BLOCK PARTY: SOUNDS OF THE STREET

Annual Rubin Museum Block Party will celebrate the sounds of the street this year

Annual Rubin Museum Block Party will celebrate the sounds of the street this year

Rubin Museum of Art
West 17th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
Sunday, July 16, free (including free museum admission all day), 1:00 – 4:00
rubinmuseum.org

The Rubin Museum plans to make some noise at its annual block party, taking place July 16 from 1:00 to 4:00 on West Seventeenth St. This year’s fête is inspired by the new exhibition “The World Is Sound,” which explores the impact of sound in Tibetan Buddhism in the creation / death / rebirth cycle, with ritual music, immersive installations, and the largest “Om” ever, recorded by visitors to the Om Lab. The block party will have spaces for meditation, hands-on art activities for adults and children, a silent disco with Nepali pop curated by Dorjee Dolma, Himalayan snacks, bubble painting, the Wheel of Sounds and the Wheel of Feelings, and live performances by the New York Suwa Taiko Association, the Blue Angels Drumline, poets John Giorno and Tenzin Dickyi, MSHR (Birch Cooper and Brenna Murphy), and Dana Flynn of Laughing Lotus Yoga in addition to a Kirtan concert with the Bhakti Center. Partyers can also stop by “Drawing Sound,” a live painting and sound collaboration curated and hosted by Rhiannon Catalyst, and check out presentations by ACHA Himalayan Sisterhood (music selections), Adhikaar (oral histories), Grassroots Movement in Nepal (Nepali children’s songs), India Home (Garba dance), Tibetan Community of NY/NJ (musical instruments demos), and the United Sherpa Association (translating English names into Tibetan). As a bonus, the museum will be open for free all day long (11:00 am – 6:00 pm), so you can experience such exhibits as “Henri Cartier-Bresson: India in Full Frame,” “Masterworks of Himalayan Art,” and “Sacred Spaces” asw well as “The World Is Sound.”

BRONX GOTHIC

(photo courtesy of Grasshopper Film)

Okwui Okpokwasili takes viewers behind the scenes of her one-woman show in Bronx Gothic (photo courtesy of Grasshopper Film)

BRONX GOTHIC (Andrew Rossi, 2017)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
July 12-25
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
grasshopperfilm.com

“Okwui’s job is to scare people, just to scare them to get them to kind of wake up,” dancer, choreographer, and conceptualist Ralph Lemon says of his frequent collaborator and protégée Okwui Okpokwasili in the powerful new documentary Bronx Gothic. Directed by Okpokwasili’s longtime friend Andrew Rossi, the film follows Okpokwasili during the last three months of her tour for her semiautobiographical one-woman show, Bronx Gothic, a fierce, confrontational, yet heart-wrenching production that hits audiences right in the gut. Rossi cuts between scenes from the show — he attached an extra microphone to Okpokwasili’s body to create a stronger, more immediate effect on film — to Parkchester native Okpokwasili giving backstage insight, visiting her Nigerian-born, Bronx-based parents, and spending time with her husband, Peter Born, who directed and designed the show, and their young daughter, Umechi. The performance itself begins with Okpokwasili already moving at the rear of the stage, shaking and vibrating relentlessly, facing away from people as they filter in and take their seats. She continues those unnerving movements for nearly a half hour (onstage but not in the film) before finally turning around and approaching a mic stand, where she portrays a pair of eleven-year-old girls exchanging deeply personal notes, talking about dreams, sexuality, violence, and abuse as they seek their own identity. “Bronx Gothic is about two girls sharing secrets. . . . It is about the adolescent body going into a new body, inhabiting the body of a brown girl in a world that privileges whiteness,” Okpokwasili, whose other works include Poor People’s TV Room and the Bessie-winning Pent-Up: A Revenge Dance, explains in the film. National Medal of Arts recipient Lemon adds, “It’s about racism, gender politics — it’s not just about these two little black girls in the Bronx.” Rossi includes clips of Okpokwasili performing at MoMA in Lemon’s “On Line” in 2011, developing Bronx Gothic at residencies at Baryshnikov Arts Center and New York Live Arts, and participating in talkbacks at Alverno College in Milwaukee and the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, where the tour concluded, right next to her childhood church, which brings memories surging back to her.

(photo courtesy of Grasshopper Film)

Okwui Okpokwasili nuzzles her daughter, Umechi, in poignant and timely documentary (photo courtesy of Grasshopper Film)

Rossi is keenly aware of the potentially controversial territory he has entered. “As a white man, I was conscious of the complexity and implications of embarking on a project that revolves around the experience of African American females,” he points out in his director’s statement. “But fundamentally, I believe in an artist’s creative ability to explore topics that are foreign to the artist’s own background. I think this takes on even more resonance when the work itself has an explicit objective to ‘grow our empathic capacity,’ as Okwui says of Bronx Gothic, [seeking] an audience that is composed of ‘black women, black men, Asian women, Asian men, white women, white men, Latina women, Latina men….’” Cinematographers Bryan Sarkinen and Rossi (Page One: Inside the New York Times, The First Monday in May) can’t get enough of Okpokwasili’s mesmerizing face, which commands attention, whether she’s smiling, singing, or crying, as well as her body, which is drenched with sweat in the show. “We have been acculturated to watching brown bodies in pain. I’m asking you to see the brown body. I’m going to be falling, hitting a hardwood floor, and hopefully there is a flood of feeling for a brown body in pain,” Okpokwasili says. Meanwhile, shots of the audience reveal some individuals aghast, some hypnotized, and others looking away. Editor Andrew Coffman and coeditors Thomas Rivera Montes and Rossi shift from Okpokwasili performing to just being herself, but the film has occasional bumpy transitions; also, Okpokwasili, who wrote the show when she was pregnant, does the vast majority of the talking, echoing her one-woman show but also at times bordering on becoming self-indulgent. (Okpokwasili produced the film with Rossi, while Born serves as one of the executive producers.) But the documentary is a fine introduction to this unique and fearless creative force and a fascinating examination of the development of a timely, brave work. Bronx Gothic opens July 12 at Film Forum, with Okpokwasili and Rossi taking part in Q&As at the 7:00 screenings on July 12, 14, and 15.

NEW YORK TRANSIT MUSEUM VINTAGE BUS BASH, FULL MOON FESTIVAL, IT’S YOUR TERN! AND MORE ON GOVERNORS ISLAND

New York Transit Museum Vintage Bus Bash pulls into Governors Island on Saturday (photo by Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit)

New York Transit Museum Vintage Bus Bash pulls into Governors Island on Saturday (photo by Marc A. Hermann / MTA New York City Transit)

Governors Island
Saturday, July 8, most events free
govisland.com/events

Tomorrow is a busy day on Governors Island, one of the city’s genuine summer treasures. The New York Transit Museum Vintage Bus Bash (11:00 am – 4:00 pm, free) pulls into Colonels Row, four classic old vehicles that used to shuttle passengers around the city. You’ll be able to check out 1956’s Bus 3100, 1958’s Bus 9098, 1959’s Bus 100, and 1971’s Bus 5227. The seventh annual Full Moon Festival takes place from 12 noon to 2:00 ($50-$61) on the Play Lawn, with Vic Mensa, Larry Heard a.k.a. Mr. Fingers, Kelela, DJ Harvey, Connan Mockasin, Abra, Jeremy Underground, Axel Boman, Tops, Awesome Tapes from Africa, Selvagem, Donna Leake, and Mass Meditation by the Big Quiet. The fourth annual It’s Your Tern! Festival (12 noon – 4:00, free) celebrates the threatened common tern, many of which have been nesting on Tango Pier. There will be games, arts and crafts, a scavenger hunt, a special spotting scope viewing, and bird tours led by Annie Barry and Kellie Quinones. The free Rite of Summer Music Festival in Nolan Park presents “Pamela Z — Works for Voice and Electronics” at 1:00 and 3:00, a live performance by the San Francisco-based composer and media artist. In addition, you can visit such free continuing exhibitions and programs as “The Public Works Department Presents: Sanctuary City,” “Christodora: Nature, Learning, Leadership,” “New York Electronic Art Festival,” “Art of Intuitive Photography,” a family-friendly literary party at “The Empire State Center for the Book,” the NYC Audubon Summer Residency, “Escaping Time: Art from U.S. Prisons,” “Billion Oyster Project Exhibit,” “Sculptors Guild Presents: Currently 80,” A.I.R. Gallery’s “Taken on Trust,” the Children’s Museum of Manhattan’s Island Outpost, LMCC’s “A Supple Perimeter” by Kameela Janan Rasheed, the Woolgatherers’ “Genesis 22,” and the Dysfunctional Theatre Company’s “Dancing with Light.”