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

SCARY MOVIES 9 — AN EVENING WITH LARRY FESSENDEN: THE LAST WINTER

THE LAST WINTER is first of two scary movies from Larry Fessendens Glass Eye Pix screening at Lincoln Center series

THE LAST WINTER is first of two scary movies from Larry Fessenden’s Glass Eye Pix screening at Lincoln Center on November 3

AN EVENING WITH LARRY FESSENDEN: THE LAST WINTER (Larry Fessenden, 2006)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Tuesday, November 3, 7:00
Series continues through November 5
212-875-5050
www.thelastwinter.net
www.filmlinc.org

In Alaska, a company called North is preparing to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, with the permission of the U.S. government. North has sent along environmentalist James Hoffman (James LeGros) and his assistant, Elliot Taylor (Jamie Harrold), to ensure that the team, led by the imposing Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman), follows all proper guidelines and agreements. But when strange things start happening — including weird visions, odd disappearances, and brutal deaths — Pollack is determined to move forward, no matter the cost. Written and directed by Larry Fessenden (Habit, Wendigo), who also makes a cameo in the film, The Last Winter is a global-warming horror story in the tradition of John Carpenter’s The Thing, where the small cast of characters never knows just what is waiting for them around every corner — and out on the treacherous, blindingly white landscape that surrounds and engulfs them. The film also stars Connie Britton (Friday Night Lights) as Abby Sellers, a strong-minded woman who has left Pollack for Hoffman; indie stalwart Kevin Corrigan (Walking and Talking) as vehicle expert Motor; Zach Gilford (Friday Night Lights) as young and innocent Maxwell McKinder; Grammy-winning composer and musician Joanne Shenandoah (Skywoman) as Dawn Russell, who prepares the meals and cleans up after everyone; and Pato Hoffmann (Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman) as Lee Means, a Native American who has a deep understanding of the land and the spirits. A scary look at an all-too-possible future, The Last Winter is screening on November 3 at 7:00 in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Scary Movies 9,” appropriately enough, and will be followed by a Q&A with Fessenden, Perlman, and LeGros. “An Evening with Larry Fessenden,” who is celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of his indie film company, Glass Eye Pix, continues at 9:30 with Mickey Keating’s Darling, followed by a Q&A with Keating, Fessenden, and actors Lauren Ashley Carter and Brian Morvant.

MATHIEU AMALRIC — RENAISSANCE MAN: THE BLUE ROOM

Mathieu Amalric stars as a husband and father in deep trouble in film he also directed and cowrote

CinéSalon: THE BLUE ROOM (LA CHAMBRE BLEUE) (Mathieu Amalric, 2014)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, November 3, $14, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through December 15
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org
www.lachambrebleue-lefilm.com

Real-life partners Mathieu Amalric and Stéphanie Cléau strip Georges Simenon’s short 1955 novel The Blue Room to its bare essentials — and we do mean bare — in their intimate, claustrophobic modern noir adaptation, which kicks off FIAF’s six-week tribute to Amalric, consisting of the eight-film CinéSalon series “Mathieu Amalric: Renaissance Man” and the special two-night theatrical presentation Fight or Flight (Le Moral des Ménages), starring Amalric and Anne-Laure Tondu, directed by Cléau. In addition to being one of the world’s most talented actors, starring in such films as Kings and Queen, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, A Christmas Tale, and Venus in Fur, Amalric has directed several previous works, including On Tour, which earned him the Best Director prize at Cannes. In The Blue Room, Amalric plays Julien Gahyde, a successful agriculture equipment salesman whose passionate affair with a local pharmacist’s wife, Esther Despierre (Cléau, who cowrote the script with Amalric), appears to have ended in murder. The film opens with Grégoire Hetzel’s lush, sweeping music as the camera makes its way to a blue hotel room where Julien and Esther have just made love offscreen. “Did I hurt you?” she asks. “No,” he responds. “You’re angry,” she says. “No,” he repeats as she laughs and a drop of blood falls on a creamy white sheet. Only then do we see the naked, sweaty couple, whose lurid tale has been succinctly revealed by this highly stylized, beautifully orchestrated scene. Next we hear Julien being interrogated by a magistrate (Laurent Poitrenaux) about a suspicious death, and soon we see Julien in handcuffs in the police station. We don’t know exactly what crime he has been accused of, nor do we know the victim — it could be Julien’s wife, Delphine (Léa Drucker), Esther’s husband, Nicolas (Olivier Mauvezin), or maybe even Esther herself. But as director Amalric, cinematographer Christophe Beaucarne, and editor François Gedigier cut between the past and the present, the details slowly unfold — although that doesn’t mean they ever become completely clear.

Amalric fills The Blue Room with bold splashes of color amid all the darkness and muted skin tones, from the red towel that signals Julien and Esther’s illicit rendezvous to Delphine’s blue bikini to the strikingly red hair of Nicolas’s mother (Véronique Alain) and the shiny green and yellow John Deere equipment he sells. Amalric and Cléau trim so much out of the original story that it too often feels overly cold and calculating, the manipulation too clear and obvious. The nudity also lacks subtlety; Amalric and Cléau might be comfortable with each other sans clothing, but it seems to be a bit of an obsession with Amalric the director. Nonetheless, The Blue Room, shot in the old-fashioned aspect ratio of 1:33 and running a mere seventy-six minutes, is a gripping yarn, a lurid tale of sex and murder, pain and passion, and femmes fatale, told from the point of view of a relatively quiet, reserved man who never thought his world could just fall apart like it does. With such plot elements as adultery and murder and even the presence of a young daughter (Mona Jaffart), the story cannot fail to call to mind French author Gustave Flaubert’s classic novel of provincial France and misplaced passion, Madame Bovary, but the near-echoes never become too loud, merely adding a somewhat puzzling flavor to the film, like a dream half remembered. The Blue Room is screening at 4:00 & 7:30 on November 3 in Florence Gould Hall; Amalric and Cléau will participate in a Q&A following the 7:30 show. The series continues through December 15 with such other Amalric films as My Sex Life . . . or How I Got into an Argument, The Screen Illusion, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. A companion series continues at Anthology Film Archives through November 8.

TICKET ALERT: JOHN CLEESE AT THE SKIRBALL CENTER

Who: John Cleese
What: Reading and talk in conjunction with paperback release of So, Anyway . . . (Three Rivers Press, September 2015, $16)
Where: NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, 566 LaGuardia Pl., 212-992-8484
When: Saturday, November 14, $65.75 – $125, 6:30
Why: “I made my first public appearance on the stairs up to the school nurse’s room, at St. Peter’s Preparatory School, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England, on September 13, 1948. I was eight and five-sixths. My audience was a pack of nine-year-olds, who were jeering at me and baying, ‘Chee-eese! Chee-eese!’ I kept climbing the steps, despite the feelings of humiliation and fear. But above all, I was bewildered. How had I managed to attract so much attention? What had I done to provoke this aggression? And . . . how on earth did they know my family surname had once been Cheese?” So begins So, Anyway . . ., the memoir of one of the funniest men in the history of the world, Monty Python and Fawlty Towers legend John Cleese. On November 14, the star and writer of A Fish Called Wanda and cinematic portrayer of the Black Knight, Tim the Enchanter, Deadly Dirk, Nearly Headless Nick, King Harold, Q, and many other roles, will be climbing the steps of NYU’s Skirball Center on November 14, to talk about his wild and wacky life and career and all that attention and aggression. The four-time-married, self-described “writer, actor & tall person,” who is also a bit of a silly walker, is visiting Boston, Chicago, and New York celebrating the release of the paperback edition of the book. VIP tickets ($125) come with a signed copy of So, Anyway . . . and a photo opp with Mr. Cleese. Be sure to join in the chants of “Chee-eese! Chee-eese!”

MAKING ROUNDS

Two doctors diagnose patients the old-fashioned way at Mount Sinai in MAKING ROUNDS

MAKING ROUNDS (Muffie Meyer, 2014)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, October 30
212-924-3363
firstrunfeatures.com
www.cinemavillage.com

Over the last several decades, the U.S. health care system has grown increasingly impersonal because of technological advancement, the pharmaceutical boom, and the privatization of public hospitals. But two old-time doctors at Mount Sinai Heart are keeping the human touch alive, and not just for nostalgia’s sake. Muffie Meyer’s sweet-natured, important documentary, Making Rounds, follows Dr. Valentin Fuster, the director of Mount Sinai Heart, and Dr. Herschel Sklaroff, clinical professor of medicine, cardiology, as they lead residents from room to room in the Cardiac Care Unit at New York City’s Mount Sinai Hospital, diagnosing patients with a refreshing lack of reliance on technology. “We both have the philosophy that the number one objective in medicine is the patient,” Dr. Fuster explains. “We both believe that most of what you learn about a particular patient is at the bedside, not with machines.” Dr. Sklaroff adds, “Dr. Fuster and I make rounds the old-fashioned way. The first thing that we do is go to the patient and hold his hand. With that touch you establish rapport instantly. We were trained to go to the bedside and talk to the patients, and take the perfect history, do the perfect physical, from which one ought to be able to make a diagnosis or come close to a diagnosis, maybe ninety percent of the time.” They display a warm, caring bedside manner as they talk, touch, listen, and teach, examining a sixty-seven-year-old woman with coronary heart disease, a twenty-two-year-old single mother who needs a heart transplant, and a fifty-one-year-old man with cardiomyopathy who resists treatment.

Meyer, who codirected Grey Gardens and has directed many television documentaries and nonfiction miniseries (Twyla on Twyla, Liberty! The American Revolution), includes some surprising facts about the health-care system; for example: “In the U.S., we spend an estimated 700 billion dollars a year on tests and procedures that do not improve health outcomes” and “Every year in the U.S., there are at least half a million misdiagnoses in primary care alone — an estimated 10 to 20% of cases.” She doesn’t use any talking heads to either support or question the doctors’ methods, so it’s all a bit one-sided, but it seems pretty hard to deny the old-timers’ success. After watching this engaging, and, in its own way, scary portrait of a dying art, you’ll never look at your own doctor the same again. Making Rounds opens October 30 at Cinema Village; Meyer and Dr. Sklaroff will participate in a Q&A following the 7:00 show Friday night.

PASOLINI 40 YEARS LATER: WITH ALFREDO JAAR AND NORMAN MacAFEE

Alfredo Jaar, THE ASHES OF PASOLINI, 2009. Video: 38:00 (Courtesy the artist, New York)

Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Sunday, November 1, free, 12:30 pm
646-336-5771
anthologyfilmarchives.org
www.alfredojaar.net

Chilean artist, architect, and filmmaker Alfredo Jaar honors the fortieth anniversary of the mysterious murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini with a special presentation at Anthology Film Archives on November 1. “Pasolini 40 Years Later: with Alfredo Jaar and Norman MacAfee” consists of a screening of Jaar’s 2009 documentary, The Ashes of Pasolini, the launch of a new artist book, Pier Paolo Pasolini: The Ashes of Gramsci, readings from the iconoclastic Italian writer and director’s poetry, and a discussion about Pasolini’s life and work. Jaar will be joined by writer, visual artist, literary translator, and freelance book editor Norman MacAfee for the event. Jaar has written that The Ashes of Pasolini — a eulogy for Pasolini inspired by Pasolini’s poem “The Ashes of Gramsci,” which was a eulogy for Italian theoretician Antonio Gramsci — “is a modest film about the death of an extraordinary intellectual. . . . As you know, it is still unclear who killed him. But for me, it has always been clear why: it was because of fear. Fear of his voice, fear of his life style, fear of his ideas, fear of his opinions, fear of his intellect. He was the totally complete intellectual: a filmmaker, a poet, a writer, a journalist, a critic, a polemist. He was totally involved in the cultural and political life of his time. As an artist he took risks, broke the rules, he created his own rules.” The tribute will be followed by a book signing and reception; the book will be available for purchase for $10.

MATHIEU AMALRIC — RENAISSANCE MAN: KINGS AND QUEEN

The always-engaging Mathieu Amalric is being feted by Anthology Film Archives and the French Institute Alliance Française

KINGS AND QUEEN (ROIS ET REINE) (Arnaud Desplechin, 2004)
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave. at Second St.
Saturday, October 31, 6:00, and Saturday, November 7, 8:30
Series runs October 29 – November 8 (companion series at FIAF runs November 3 – December 15)
212-505-5181
anthologyfilmarchives.org

Award-winning French actor-director Mathieu Amalric is celebrating his fiftieth birthday with an exciting invasion of New York City, where he is being honored in a pair of terrific companion film series and will also star in a theatrical production. FIAF’s CinéSalon tribute runs on Tuesday nights through December 15, beginning November 3 with a screening of his 2014 film The Blue Room, followed by a Q&A with Amalric and costar and cowriter Stéphanie Cléau, who is also his real-life partner; Amalric will also star in Fight or Flight (Le Moral des Ménages), Cléau’s stage adaptation of the novel by Eric Reinhardt. But the big festivities begin at Anthology Film Archives, where “Mathieu Amalric: Renaissance Man” runs October 29 through November 8, featuring ten of his films, including Otar Iosseliani’s 1984 Favorites of the Moon, in which he makes his film debut, and 2001’s Eat Your Soup, his first directorial effort.

Mathieu Amalric won a César for his starring role in KINGS AND QUEEN

Mathieu Amalric won a César for his starring role in Arnaud Desplechin’s KINGS AND QUEEN

Amalric has made several films with Arnaud Desplechin (A Christmas Tale, My Sex Life . . . or How I Got into an Argument), and one of the best is being shown October 31 and November 7 at Anthology. In Kings and Queen, Emmanuelle Devos is spectacular as Nora, a divorced single mother with a ten-year-old son (Valentin Lelong), an ailing father (Maurice Garrel), a troubled sister (Nathalie Boutefeu), a straitlaced, boring fiance (Olivier Rabourdin), a dead ex-husband who appears as a ghost (Joachim Salinger), a manic, tax-evading ex-husband who is institutionalized (a fabulous Amalric), and a deep-seated survival instinct that is infectious. Throw in a suicidal woman (Magalie Woch) who can’t get enough sex, an alluring doctor (Catherine Deneuve), a drug-addicted lawyer (Hippolyte Girardot), a remarkably calm, gun-toting convenience-store owner (Jean-Paul Roussillon), and other unusual characters and plotlines and you have one highly entertaining, complex, and marvelously original French drama that will fly by much faster than its two-and-a-half-hour length would lead you to believe. Amalric won his first César for the role; he won his second three years later for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Amalric will be at Anthology to introduce the October 31 screening of Roman Polanski’s Venus in Fur.

ERNESTO PUJOL: 9 – 5

Eleven performers dressed in white take notes on passersby in Ernesto Pujol’s “9 – 5” at Brookfield Place (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Brookfield Place
230 Vesey St.
October 26-28, free, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
brookfieldplaceny.com
9-5 slideshow

Social choreographer Ernesto Pujol takes the concept of the open office plan to a whole new level with 9 – 5, a site-specific durational performance running October 26 to 28 just inside the fifty-five-foot-tall front windows of the Pavilion at Brookfield Place. The Havana-born, New York–based Pujol has situated eleven performers, all dressed in white, at small desks, where they take notes, silently and calmly reflecting on what they observe as some thirty-five thousand people swirl about, on their way to Le District, Hudson Eats, the Winter Garden, the subway, or back to their own desks in their own offices. Meanwhile, outside and behind the eleven people, West St. is a whirlwind of activity, with massive construction, speeding cars, and the building of the new World Trade Center train station. There is a heavenly, meditative feeling in the air around the performers (Dillon de Give, Kate Harding, Young Sun Han, Sara Jimenez, Bess Matassa, James Rich, Valarie Samulski, Catilin Turski, Michael Watson, Joy Whalen, and Jayoung Yoon), almost as if they are guardian angels watching out for us as they jot things down in their notebooks; then again, they could also be spying on us in a very public form of surveillance. But mostly, Pujol is trying to get all of us — commuters, tourists, office workers, shoppers, passersby, etc. — to just slow down: “Close your eyes / Take a deep breath / Open your eyes and look around / (Repeat this if necessary) / Take a deep breath with eyes wide open / Begin to see.”

Ernesto Pujol’s “9 – 5” continues at the Brookfield Place Pavilion through October 28 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

There’s a Zen-like philosophy to what Pujol does, particularly as he examines the monotony of the 9 – 5 world. On his website, he explains, “I perform as a form of ephemeral, collective, and psychic portraiture. My public, durational, group performances seek to reveal the unseen, the intangible, the invisible, and the lost. It is performance practice as a form of perception, reclamation, and mourning. To memorialize and to mourn may result in transformative experiences, in steps toward forgiveness, reparation, and healing.” A collaboration with Brookfield Place and More Art, 9 – 5 is that much more powerful with the Freedom Tower standing outside, reminding viewers of the invisible and the lost, of what isn’t there — and what has arisen in its place, phoenix-like. Pujol, who has previously staged such works as Speaking in Silence in Hawaii in 2011, Farmers Dream in Kansas in 2010, and Baptizing a Garden in South Carolina in 2008, will be leading a free workshop, “Embodied Meditation,” on November 2 & 4 at 12:30 with body practice teacher Samulski and will deliver a free lecture, “The Art of Mindful Presence,” on November 4 at 6:30; advance RSVPs are required.