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

NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL: PROJECTIONS OF AMERICA & THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A JEEP

Documentary reveals little-known U.S. propaganda efforts during WWII to show rest of world the American way of life

PROJECTIONS OF AMERICA (Peter Miller, 2015) & THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A JEEP (Irving Lerner, 1943)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Wednesday, January 13, 1:30 & 6:00
Festival runs January 13-26
nyjff.org

The twenty-fifth annual New York Jewish Film Festival gets under way January 13 with a look at a little-known part of the U.S. propaganda effort during WWII. In Projections of America, director Peter Miller details how the U.S. Office of War Information used specially made short documentary films to show the rest of the world the positive aspects of the American way of life, particularly as U.S. soldiers helped liberate many cities and countries in Eastern and Western Europe. “The films were idealized versions of what America could be, created by politically engaged filmmakers who, while fighting tyranny abroad, wanted also to fundamentally change America itself,” narrator John Lithgow explains. At the center of it all was Oscar-winning screenwriter Robert Riskin, who had written eight Frank Capra films, including It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and Meet John Doe. Riskin, fellow scribe and chief of production Philip Dunne (How Green Was My Valley, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir), and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, and FDR speech writer Robert E. Sherwood (The Petrified Forest, Abe Lincoln in Illinois) enlisted such directors and producers as John Houseman and Josef von Sternberg and such stars as Ingrid Bergman in making such short propaganda films as Swedes in America, Cowboys, Steel Town, The Valley of the Tennessee, and Watchtower over America, which people flocked to in Europe, North Africa, and even Germany. “It all came together as the greatest collection of filmmakers working toward one common goal that we will ever see,” notes film historian Cecile Starr.

Miller also interviews historians Ian Scott, Marja Roholl, and Stéphane Lamache, film critic Kenneth Turan, screenwriter David Rintels, and assistant film editor Aram Boyajian in addition to Normandy residents Michel Ollivier and Margit Cohn Siebner, Cummington resident Bill Streeter, French Resistance fighter Paul Le Goupil, Berlin resident Klaus Riemer, and German projectionist Heinz Meder. “We wanted to know: How did the Americans live?” Riemer remembers. In addition, Miller speaks with Riskin’s daughters Victoria and Susan and son Robert Jr., who talk about their father and mother, King Kong actress Fay Wray, with cherished memories. Projections of America is not only about the power of the movies but is also very much a love story between Riskin, a Jewish American from the Lower East Side, and the Canadian-born Wray, who appeared in some one hundred Hollywood films.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A JEEP uses the general purpose military vehicle as propaganda in short film

Projections of America features telling clips from many of these thought-to-be-lost shorts, including Arturo Toscanini, which was made to combat the evils of Fascism with footage of the great Italian conductor working in the West; The Cummington Story, about a small town that suddenly gets an influx of war refugees; and The Autobiography of a “Jeep,” which is being shown at the Jewish Film Festival along with Projections of America. The extremely popular nine-minute short anthropomorphizes the military vehicle, which got its name because of its “general purpose,” through first-person narration that equates it with the American soldier, except that it is 60-horsepower strong, 2200 pounds, 11 feet long, 5 feet wide, and 3 feet high. Among those photographed riding in a Jeep are Franklin D. Roosevelt, Laurel and Hardy, King George VI, Douglas MacArthur, and the Queen Mother as it hypes the future of the United States. Together, Projections of America and The Autobiography of a “Jeep” shed light on a fascinating aspect of what the country believed itself to be and what its hopes and dreams were for the future. The two films are screening on January 13 at 1:30 and 6:00 at the Walter Reade Theater and will be followed by Q&As with Miller; the festival, a joint project of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum, celebrates its silver anniversary with a slate of old and new gems, continuing through January 26 with such other films as Yared Zeleke’s Lamb, Amos Gitai’s Rabin, the Last Day, Andrzej Wajda’s Holy Week, Marianne Lambert’s I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman, and Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse as well as panel discussions and a master class with Alan Berliner.

LHOMME BEHIND THE CAMERA: LE SAUVAGE

Catherine Deneuve and Yves Montand star in Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s screwball romantic comedy, LE SAUVAGE

CinéSalon: LE SAUVAGE (THE SAVAGE) (LOVERS LIKE US) (Jean-Paul Rappeneau, 1975)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, January 12, $14, 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through February 23
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

The spectacularly gorgeous Catherine Deneuve and the ruggedly handsome Yves Montand play it for outrageous laughs in Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s screwball romantic comedy, Le Sauvage, aka Lovers Like Us. Deneuve is mesmerizing as Nelly, an unpredictable woman who lives by her wits, as if she is a feral child raised by wolves. She acts out instantly on her id, without concerning herself with the consequences and effects on other people. She is engaged to marry Vittorio (Luigi Vannucchi), a hot-blooded Italian who is none too happy when she bolts in the middle of the night. In need of money, Nelly goes to the nightclub where she worked for a year without getting paid, demanding her salary, but when slick manager Alex Fox (Tony Roberts) refuses to give her a dime, she takes off with his prized possession, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s “La Goulue at the Moulin Rouge.” She tries to sell the painting to the stranger in the hotel room next to hers, Martin (Montand), but when Vittorio wrongly assumes he is his fiancée’s lover, Martin gets caught up in the middle of some crazy silliness as well as legitimate danger. Soon Martin and Nelly are living on a deserted island, she on the run from Vittorio, he hiding from his mysterious past.

Nominated for four César Awards — Best Actress (Deneuve), Best Director, Best Cinematography (Pierre Lhomme), and Best Editing (Marie-Josèphe Yoyotte) — Le Sauvage can be, er, savagely funny as well as absurdly silly. The plot takes plenty of awkward twists and turns as the action moves from Caracas to the Bahamas, from the Virgin Islands to New York City and France. Much of the madcap comedy is overblown, but it’s still an awful lot of fun, primarily because Deneuve and Montand are a joy to watch, and Rappeneau never misses a chance to showcase her beauty (oh, when she is washing her hair and the camera cuts in on her . . .) and his machismo (even slyly referencing The Wages of Fear when Montand gets behind the wheel of his truck). Roberts shows off his slapstick skills, but the subplot involving Vittorio’s endless chase of a woman who doesn’t want him grows both tiresome and misogynistic, and Bobo Lewis is way too over the top as the odd Miss Mark. The delightful music by Michel Legrand goes hand in hand with Lhomme’s bright and cheerful cinematography, with scene after scene painted in lush pastel colors that dazzle the eyes. So it is rather appropriate that Le Sauvage is kicking off FIAF’s two-month tribute to the eighty-five-year-old French cinematographer, the subject of the CinéSalon series “Lhomme Behind the Camera,” screening at 4:00 and 7:30 on January 12 in Florence Gould Hall. The series continues through February 23 with such other Lhomme-lensed films as Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows, Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore, and Chris Marker and Lhomme’s Le Joli Mai.

TROUBLEMAKERS: THE STORY OF LAND ART

James Crump shines a light on TROUBLEMAKERS

James Crump shines a light on the iconoclastic earthworks artists — and such massive projects as Nancy Holt’s “Sun Tunnels,” above — in TROUBLEMAKERS

TROUBLEMAKERS: THE STORY OF LAND ART (James Crump, 2014)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, January 8
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
troublemakersthefilm.com

In the 1960s, a small group of experimental artists rejected the gallery system and the traditional art market by turning the planet into their canvas, creating monumental, often apocalyptic “earthworks” in far-off locations in the American Southwest that were nearly impossible to find. Director James Crump explores who these iconoclastic pioneers were and what they accomplished — and, in some cases, are still doing — in Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art. “The idea of land art is to relate to the idea of the globe, especially after the spaceship, the first picture of the earth, [gave] you the idea that earth is an object, so the idea for these artists after 1963 is that you can shape something, which is a sphere,” explains arte povera expert and art historian Germano Celant, who goes on to talk about the influence of airplane flight and Marcel Duchamp. “So the idea of looking from a high level is changing the perspective, your knowledge about art. And you can design it, you can draw. The area of view is a change in the history of art. It’s all this kind of convergence of information — technology, information, and history — that makes land art.” Crump (Black White + Gray) concentrates primarily on three artists, Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, and Walter De Maria, combining rarely shown archival footage, photographs, and film clips with old and/or new interviews of artists Carl Andre, Vito Acconci, Charles Ross, Willoughby Sharp, Lawrence Weiner, and Nancy Holt (Smithson’s widow) and gallerists Paula Cooper and Virginia Dwan.

James Crump interviews Lawrence Weiner about the land-art movement in TROUBLEMAKERS

Dwan, a major supporter of the land artists, shares compelling stories about the individuals, both their personalities and their working process, while Acconci discusses the movement from a more philosophical angle, referring to the minimalist, conceptual earthworks as “an exchange with nature” that was “a new kind of religious pilgrimage.” Using bulldozers, excavators, and even earthquakes as their brushes, these artists carved, dug, and constructed massive projects in places that very few people would ever get to see, more concerned with the earth, the sun, and the vast landscape of the planet than with creating art that could be shown in galleries and museums and sold to collectors and corporations. Crump examines such remarkable projects as Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” Heizer’s “Double Negative,” De Maria’s “The Lightning Field,” Holt’s “Sun Tunnels,” and Ross’s forty-plus-year work-in-progress, “Star Axis,” some of which you can still see today. But earthworks, which were in part a response to the Vietnam War, were not a rejection of the city itself; Troublemakers shows many of the artists hanging out at Max’s Kansas City on Park Ave., where they ate, drank, and made professional connections. But one artist who avoided that scene was Heizer, who just had a show at Gagosian in Chelsea and did not participate in the making of the documentary. “It’s not worth anything,” he says about his art. “In fact, it’s an obligation.” A refreshing look at an utterly intriguing moment in twentieth-century art — and at a movement that takes on new meaning as the planet is in peril as a result of climate change — Troublemakers opens January 8 at the IFC Center; Crump will participate in a Q&A following the 4:25 screening on January 9.

STEVE McCURRY SELECTS: SUNSET BOULEVARD

Billy Wilder takes audiences down quite a Hollywood road in SUNSET BLVD.

SUNSET BOULEVARD (Billy Wilder, 1950)
Rubin Museum of Art
150 West 17th St. at Seventh Ave.
Friday, January 8, $10, 9:30
Series continues Friday nights through February 26
212-620-5000
rubinmuseum.org

“You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big,” handsome young screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) remarks to an older woman in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small,” the former star (Gloria Swanson) famously replies. It doesn’t get much bigger than Sunset Boulevard, one of the grandest Hollywood movies ever made about Hollywood. The wickedly entertaining film noir begins in a swimming pool, where Gillis is a floating corpse, seen from below. He then posthumously narrates through flashback precisely what landed him there. On the run from a couple of guys trying to repossess his car, the broke Gillis ends up at a seemingly abandoned mansion, only to find out that it is home to Desmond and her dedicated servant, Max Von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim). They initially mistake Gillis for the undertaker who is coming to perform a funeral service and burial for Desmond’s pet monkey. (You’ve got to see it to believe it.) When Desmond discovers that Gillis is in fact a screenwriter, she lures him into working with her on her script for a new version of Salome, in which she is determined to play the lead role. “I didn’t know you were planning a comeback,” Gillis says. “I hate that word,” Desmond responds. “It’s a return, a return to the millions of people who have never forgiven me for deserting the screen.” But just as Desmond was unable to make the transition from silent black-and-white films to color and sound pictures, getting Salome off the ground is not going to be as easy as she thinks. Hollywood can be a rather vicious place, after all.

Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) keeps a close hold on screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden) in SUNSET BLVD.

Nominated for eleven Oscars and winner of three — for the sharp writing, the detailed art/set decoration, and Franz Waxman’s score, which goes from jazzy noir to melodrama — Sunset Boulevard wonderfully bites the hand that feeds it, skewering Hollywood while making references to such real stars as Rudolph Valentino, Mabel Normand, John Gilbert, Greta Garbo, Wallace Reid, and Tyrone Power and such films as Gone with the Wind and King Kong. Actual publicity stills and movie posters abound, in Paramount offices and Desmond’s spectacularly designed home, which was once owned by J. Paul Getty and would later be used for Rebel without a Cause. Cecil B. DeMille, who directed Swanson in many silent films, plays himself in the movie, seen on set making Samson and Delilah. Desmond’s fellow bridge players are portrayed by silent stars Buster Keaton, H. B. Warner, and Anna Q. Nilsson. Meanwhile, before Swanson fired him, von Stroheim directed her in the silent film Queen Kelly, which is the movie Max shows Gillis in Desmond’s screening room. (Swanson herself would go on to make only three more feature films; she passed away in 1983 at the age of eighty-four.) John F. Seitz’s black-and-white cinematography and inventive use of camera placement, from underwater to high above the action, makes the most of Hans Dreier’s sets and Swanson’s fabulous costumes and makeup. Sunset Boulevard is the thirteenth and final collaboration between writer-director Wilder and writer-producer Charles Brackett, who together previously made The Lost Weekend and A Foreign Affair. Wilder and Holden would go on to make Stalag 17, Sabrina, and Fedora together. Finally, of course, Sunset Boulevard concludes with one of the greatest quotes in Hollywood history. Sunset Boulevard is screening January 8 as part of the Rubin Museum Cabaret Cinema series “Steve McCurry Selects,” held in conjunction with the photo exhibition “Steve McCurry: India,” and will be introduced by a special guest. The series continues Friday nights through February 26 with such other classics as Jean Renoir’s The Grand Illusion, Carol Reed’s The Third Man, and Federico Fellini’s Amarcord.

CHARLES BUKOWSKI MEMORIAL READING 2016

charles bukowski three rooms press

Who: Three Rooms Press Presents the Monthly @ Cornelia Street Cafe
What: Ninth Annual Charles Bukowski Memorial Reading
Where: Cornelia Street Cafe, 29 Cornelia St., 212-989-9319
When: Friday, January 8, $15 (includes one drink), 6:00 pm
Why: “What sort of cultural hangover keeps Charles Bukowski in print and popular more than twenty years after his death?” S. A. Griffin asks in the new Three Rooms Press essay “Charles Bukowski: Dean of Another Academy.” “In light of the fact that a good portion of what has been published since his passing in 1994 may not be the man’s best work, along with some heavy editing at times, why does Charles Bukowski remain relevant well into the 21st century?” The ninth annual Charles Bukowski Memorial Reading at Cornelia Street Cafe will explore what Bukowski would think about today’s society, with tribute readings by Kim Addonizio, Mike Daisey, Richard Vetere, Puma Perl, Michael Puzzo, George Wallace, and anyone else who signs up before 6:00, hosted by Kat Georges and Peter Carlaftes and featuring rare photos and videos, oral history, prizes, and more.

AMERICAN REALNESS

Keyon Gaskin’s IT’S NOT A THING is part of American Realness festival at Abrons Arts Center (photo by Duncan Gray)

Abrons Arts Center and other venues
466 Grand St. at Pitt St.
January 7-17, $20 unless otherwise noted
212-598-0400
www.americanrealness.com
www.abronsartscenter.org

The seventh American Realness festival consists of twenty cutting-edge theatrical presentations ($20 each), a movement workshop ($90), and four free lectures and discussions over the course of eleven days, January 7-17, almost exclusively at Abrons Arts Center. There’s so much going on that every day features between six and ten events spread throughout the venue, which includes the Experimental Theater, the Playhouse, the Underground Theater, and room 201. Two performances take place at other venues: The great Jack Ferver, who has a well-deserved rabid fan base for his deeply personal and intimate, often confessional multidisciplinary works, returns to American Realness with Mon, Ma, Mes (Revisité) at Gibney Dance (January 13-16), an updated version of a piece that debuted in 2012 at FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival and in which the audience becomes part of the action. And Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen also employs interactivity in her multimedia 69 Positions (January 15-17, $15), which connects sexuality and public space in MoMA PS1’s VW Dome. Back at Abrons, the New York premiere of Heather Kravas’s dead, disappears (January 7-11) integrates Richard Serra’s Verb List into a solo work about words and movement, woman and object. In choreographer Larissa Velez-Jackson’s Star Crap Method (January 9-17), performers Tyler Ashley, Talya Epstein, and Velez-Jackson and lighting designer Kathy Kaufman improvise as they examine the role of sound, light, music, and movement. In the world premiere of Erin Markey’s A Ride on the Irish Cream (January 13-17), Markey and Becca Blackwell bring to life the love between a girl and a pontoon boat/horse. M. Lamar’s Destruction (January 13-16) investigates the white supremacist world order using Negro spirituals. Sadness is at the heart of the New York premiere of Ligia Lewis’s Sorrow Swag (January 7-10), performed by Brian Getnick with live musical accompaniment by George Lewis Jr. Antonija Livingstone, Jennifer Lacey, Dominique Pétrin, Stephen Thompson, Dana Michel, and Brendan Dougherty collaborate on Culture Administration & Trembling (January 7-8), which explores the nature of spectatorship.

The festival also includes Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s #negrophobia (January 8-17), Keyon Gaskin’s it’s not a thing (January 8-11), Fernando Belfiore’s AL13FB<3 (January 9-12), Keith Hennessy and Jassem Hindi’s future friend/ships (January 9-12), Sara Shelton Mann, Hennessy, and Norman Rutherford’s Sara (The Smuggler) (January 11-13), Yvonne Meier’s Durch Nacht und Nebel (January 11-16), Antonio Ramos and the Gang Bangers’ Mira El! (January 12-15), choreographer Milka Djordjevich and composer Chris Peck’s Mass (January 13-15), the world premiere of the Bureau for the Future of Choreography’s Score for a Lecture, and James & Jen | McGinn & Again’s Over the River | Through the Woods diptych (January 16-17). In addition, Kravas, Lewis, Jenn Joy, and Kelly Kivland will discuss “Melancholia and Precarious Virtuosity” on January 8 at 3:30, Claudia La Rocco, Lane Czaplinski, Annie Dorsen, Yelena Gluzman, Katherine Profeta, and others will explore the question “How Should the Present Think About the Future?” on January 9 at noon, Joshua Lubin-Levy, Thomas J. Lax, Soyoung Yoon, and Cassie Mey will delve into “A Charming Uproar: On Documenting Dance” on January 10 at 3:30, Professor Thomas F. DeFrantz will lecture on “I Am Black (You Have to Be Willing to Not Know)” on January 17 at 11:00 am, and Movement Research will host the workshop “Creative Differences” with La Rocco on January 7, 10, and 12 ($90).

PROTOTYPE

Enda Walsh’s first opera, THE LAST HOTEL, is part of fourth annual Prototype festival (photo by Hugh O’Conor)

Multiple venues
January 6-17, $25 unless otherwise noted
www.prototypefestival.org

The fourth annual Prototype, consisting of pioneering, cutting-edge opera-theater and music-theater works by classical and postclassical composers, takes place January 6-17, consisting of seven presentations at multiple venues. The world premiere of composer Du Yun and librettist Royce Vavrek’s Angel’s Bone, about two angels returning to earth, features Abigail Fischer, Kyle Pfortmiller, Jennifer Charles, Kyle Bielfield, the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, and NOVUS NY and runs January 6, 9, 10, 12, 13, and 15-17 at 3-Legged Dog Art & Technology Center on Greenwich St. Vavrek also wrote the libretto for composer David T. Little’s Dog Days, making its New York City premiere January 9-11 ($25-$81) at NYU’s Skirball Center; the work is based on the short story by Judy Budnitz. Greek tragedy meets the Vietnam War in composer Heidi Rodewald and librettist Donna Di Novelli’s The Good Swimmer, a first-look presentation running at HERE January 7-17. Irish playwright and screenwriter Enda Walsh (Lazarus, Once, Hunger) wrote the libretto and directs composer Donnacha Dennehy’s The Last Hotel at St. Ann’s Warehouse January 8, 9, 10, 12, and 15-17 ($51-$61). Brooklyn-based five-piece Bombay Rickey brings its cinematic sound to HERE January 8-9 and 15-16 with a sixty-minute opera-cabaret work directed by Kristin Marting. Gregory Frateur and Nicolas Rombouts’s multimedia song cycle Sága makes its American premiere January 9-10 at National Sawdust. And on January 17, FIAF will host a one-time only concert reading of Jorge Sosa and Laura Sosa Pedroza’s La Reina, featuring mezzo-soprano Audrey Babcock, Laura Claycomb, and Christopher Burchett and conducted by David Allan Miller; it will be followed by a discussion moderated by Lawrence Edelson.