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

A SWANBERG SAMPLER: NIGHTS AND WEEKENDS

Joe Swanberg and Greta Gerwig get personal in NIGHTS AND WEEKENDS

NIGHTS AND WEEKENDS (Joe Swanberg & Greta Gerwig, 2008
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, March 1, free with museum admission, 4:30
Series runs March 1-2
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
www.nightsandweekendsmovie.com

Generation DIY examines long-distance relationships and identity in the offbeat Nights and Weekends, which is screening this weekend at the Museum of the Moving Image as part of the Saturday-Sunday mini-festival “A Swanberg Sampler,” featuring six works by mumblecore master Joe Swanberg. In the low-budget film, which was written, directed, and produced by Greta Gerwig (Greenberg, Frances Ha) and Swanberg (Kissing on the Mouth, Silver Bullets), who previously worked together on Hannah Takes the Stairs and LOL, the two play Mattie and James, respectively, a couple trying to make it work even though she’s in New York City and he’s in Chicago. The film opens with a graphic sex scene, but as the story continues, the two of them have more and more trouble communicating until, a year later, things are very different. The lo-fi indie was mostly shot in small, claustrophobic indoor sets, emphasizing the pair’s closeness as well as growing distance, in a cinéma vérité style that makes the audience feel as if it is intruding into the characters’ lives, especially given the improvised dialogue and underwhelming acting. Despite Gerwig and Swanberg’s chemistry and the very intimate relationship they portray onscreen, they have never been a couple in real life. Nights and Weekends might be an acquired taste, but it is an engaging, very personal kind of romantic comedy. The series also includes Hannah Takes the Stairs, Silver Bullets, Art History, Uncle Kent, and All the Light in the Sky, with Swanberg, who has made eleven films in the last three-plus years, present at all screenings to talk about the works.

FATAL ASSISTANCE

Documentary reveals that there’s still a whole lot to be done in Haitian recovery effort as organizations fight over details

FATAL ASSISTANCE (ASSISTANCE MORTELLE) (Raoul Peck, 2012)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
February 28 – March 6
212-875-5600
www.filmlinc.com

Award-winning Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck’s Fatal Assistance begins by posting remarkable numbers onscreen: In the wake of the devastating earthquake that hit his native country on January 12, 2010, there were 230,000 deaths, 300,000 wounded, and 1.5 million people homeless, with some 4,000 NGOs coming to Haiti to make use of a promised $11 billion in relief over a five-year period. But as Peck reveals, there is significant controversy over where the money is and how it’s being spent as the troubled Haitian people are still seeking proper health care and a place to live. “The line between intrusion, support, and aid is very fine,” says Jean-Max Bellerive, the Haitian prime minister at the time of the disaster, explaining that too many of the donors want to cherry-pick how their money is used. Bill Vastine, senior “debris” adviser for the Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti (CIRH), which was co-chaired by Bellerive and President Bill Clinton, responds, “The international community said they were gonna grant so many billions of dollars to Haiti. That didn’t mean we were gonna send so many billions of dollars to a bank account and let the Haitian government do with it as they will.” Somewhere in the middle is CIRH senior housing adviser Priscilla Phelps, who seems to be the only person who recognizes why the relief effort has turned into a disaster all its own; by the end of the film, she is struggling to hold back tears.

There’s a lot of talk but not nearly as much action in Haitian recovery from devastating earthquake

A self-described “political radical,” Peck doesn’t play it neutral in Fatal Assistance, instead adding mournful music by Alexei Aigui, somber English narration by a male voice (Peck narrates the French-language version), and a female voice-over reading melodramatic “Dear friend” letters that poetically trash what is happening in Haiti. “Every few decades, the rich promise everything to the poor,” the male voice-over says. “The dream of eradication of poverty, disease, death remains a perpetual fantasy.” Even though Peck (Lumumba, 2010 Human Rights Watch Film Festival centerpiece Moloch Tropical) attacks the agendas of the donors and NGOs while pushing an agenda of his own, Fatal Assistance is an important document that shows that just because money pours in to help in a crisis situation doesn’t mean that the things that need to be done are being taken care of properly. The centerpiece selection of the 2013 Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Fatal Assistance is back at the Film Society of Lincoln Center for its week-long U.S. theatrical release February 28 – March 6 with Peck, the former Haitian minister of culture, the 1994 winner of the HRWFF’s Nestor Almendros Award for courage in filmmaking, and the 2001 HRWFF Lifetime Achievement Award winner, on hand for Q&As after several screenings.

FIRST SATURDAYS: WOMEN’S STORIES

Alison Elizabeth Taylor, “Security House,” wood veneer and shellac, 2008-10 (Gift of the Contemporary Art Acquisition Committee; © Alison Elizabeth Taylor)

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, March 1, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed in advance at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org

In 1982, the United States recognized the first official Women’s History Week, comprising seven days in March; five years later, the third month of the year became Women’s History Month, passed by a congressional vote of 100 to 9. The Brooklyn Museum will be celebrating Women’s History Month on March 1 in their free First Saturdays programs by examining women and art, music, publishing, poetry, and more. The evening will include an artist talk by Alison Elizabeth Taylor, an arts workshop demonstrating how Taylor uses wood in her pieces, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh discussing her anti–street harassment project “Stop Telling Women to Smile,” pop-up gallery talks in English and Spanish on specific works by women, the interactive performance “Sublime” by the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective, a martial arts workshop with ABADÁ-Capoeira, a talk by Toni Blackman about hip-hop and activism, live music by Zuzuka Poderosa, TECLA, and Venus X with live animation by Niky Roehreke, pop-up spoken-word poetry, a live performance combining music and spoken-word by Alixa Garcia and Naima Penniman of Climbing PoeTree, and a book club talk by members of the Feminist Press. In addition, the galleries will be open late, giving visitors plenty of opportunity to check out “Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey,” “Twice Militant: Lorraine Hansberry’s Letters to ‘The Ladder,’” “Divine Felines: Cats of Ancient Egypt,” “Life, Death, and Transformation in the Americas,” “Connecting Cultures: A World in Brooklyn,” and other exhibits.

FESTIVAL NEUE LITERATUR: BORDER CROSSINGS

FESTIVAL NEUE LITERATUR 2014: NEW WRITING FROM AUSTRIA, GERMANY, SWITZERLAND, AND THE U.S.
Multiple venues
February 28 – March 2, free with advance RSVP
www.festivalneueliteratur.org

For the fifth annual Festival Neue Literatur, a half dozen up-and-coming German-language authors, two each from Germany (Olga Grjasnowa, Abbas Khider), Austria (Milena Michiko Flašar, Maja Haderlap), and Switzerland (Melinda Nadj Abonji, Richard Weihe), will meet with two established American writers (Monique Truong, Keith Gessen) to contemplate the role of reading and writing in today’s quickly changing global society in conjunction with this year’s theme, “Border Crossings.” The three-day festival begins at 1:00 on February 28 at Deutsches Haus Columbia with “Encounters Across the Ocean,” which pairs the six European novelists with six students each from the Department of Germanic Languages and the Creative Writing Program. On March 1 at 6:00 at the powerHouse Arena in Brooklyn, curator Tess Lewis will moderate “Memory and Language: Angels or Demons,” a discussion with Haderlap, Nadj Abonji, Michiko Flašar, and Truong that addresses such questions as “To what extent does language determine identity and one’s understanding of the world?” and “Is the fickleness of memory a burden or a liberation?” Sunday begins with a noontime Literary Brunch at Deutsches Haus NYU in which the six European writers will read from their works; German fare will be served. Things come to a close on Sunday night at 6:00 at McNally Jackson with “Search for Roots: Exile’s Revolving Doors,” with Grjasnowa, Khider, Weihe, Gessen, and moderator Lewis examining the questions “Are we all ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ now?” and “What is rootedness today?” As preparation, the 2014 reader, which includes samples of works from the six German-language writers and promises that you will “discover famous Austrian, German, and Swiss authors nobody in the U.S. has heard of,” can be downloaded for free here.

JONNY BRIGGS: MONSTRARES

Jonny Briggs, “Filling the Void,” C-print, 2013 (photo courtesy Julie Meneret Contemporary Art)

BRIGGS & HAMILTON
Julie Meneret Contemporary Art
133 Orchard St.
Wednesday, February 26, free, 6:00
Briggs exhibition continues Wednesday – Sunday through March 30
212-477-5269
www.juliemeneret.com
www.jonnybriggs.com

British photographer Jonny Briggs will be making his U.S. debut this week with the solo show “Monstrares,” running February 26 through March 30 at Julie Meneret Contemporary Art, a new gallery that opened this past fall on Orchard St. on the Lower East Side. In his work, Briggs, the 2011 winner of the Saatchi Gallery and Channel 4’s New Sensations Prize, explores his memories of childhood and family, brought to life in carefully staged installations using latex molds in photographs that are not digitally manipulated. “In search of lost parts of my childhood I try to think outside the reality I was socialised into and create new ones with my parents and self,” he explains in his artist statement. “I look back to my younger self and attempt to recapture childhood nature through my assuming adult eyes.” His work evokes that of Bernardí Roig, Ron Mueck, Will Ryman, and even a hint of Cindy Sherman, while the title is a sly combination of the Latin word for “show” or “display” and the English word “monster.” The opening-night party on February 26 will feature special guest Saskia Hamilton, who will read poems she wrote that were inspired by Briggs and his photography. Hamilton, who is the title subject of the Ben Folds and Nick Hornby song “Saskia Hamilton” (“I’ve only ever seen her name on the spine / But that’s enough I wanna make her mine”), has previously published such poetry books as Divide These and As for Dream; her latest, Corridor, is due in May from Graywolf Press.

REMASTERED AND RESTORED — TREASURES OF FRENCH CINEMA: THE COLOR OF LIES

Jacques Gamblin and Sandrine Bonnaire play a married couple facing a crisis in Claude Chabrol’s THE COLOR OF LIES

CINÉSALON: THE COLOR OF LIES (AU CŒUR DU MENSONGE) (Claude Chabrol, 1999)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, February 25, $13, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through March 18
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

“The mask reveals more than the face,” Germain-Roland Desmot (Antoine de Caunes) says in French New Wave auteur Claude Chabrol’s 1999 thriller A Color of Lies, which is actually an investigation into the concept of truth. In seaside Breton, a ten-year-old girl has been found in the woods, raped and murdered. New police inspector Lesage (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) believes the culprit is painter and art teacher René Sterne (Jacques Gamblin), the last person known to see the girl alive, but he is staunchly defended by his caring wife, Vivianne (Sandrine Bonnaire), who is striking up a close friendship with Desmot, a self-obsessed local celebrity who writes books and appears on television shows. When a second death is linked to René, Lesage thinks she’s got her man, but the truth is not so easy to uncover in this ever-more complex mélange. Cowritten by Chabrol (Les Cousins, Les Biches) and Odile Barski and shot in an ominous 1970s atmosphere by Eduardo Serra (The Girl with a Pearl Earring, Blood Diamond) that explodes with bursts of deep blues and reds, The Color of Lies is a dark mystery about love, art, obsession, and truth, centered by Bonnaire’s (Vagabond, Monsieur Hire) radiant performance as a dedicated woman facing a critical moment of doubt. Gamblin (Laissez-passer) is effective as René, a cynical, unpredictable man who walks with a cane; on the surface, it is easy to assume he is guilty of anything anyone accuses him of, but his wife’s love adds sympathy and hope that he is not the murderer. The Color of Lies is filled with tricky plot twists emanating from the trompe-l’oeil painting style employed by René in his work, and by Chabrol throughout the film, creating a false reality, like masks that people wear to try to hide the truth behind them. A digitally remastered version of The Color of Lies is screening February 25 at 4:00 & 7:30 as part of the FIAF CinéSalon series “Remastered & Restored: Treasures of French Cinema”; the later screening was supposed to be presented by costar Gamblin, who had to cancel, so a new presenter will be announced. Both shows will be followed by a wine reception. The three-month festival continues with such other recently restored French films as Claire Denis’s Chocolat (introduced by Mahen Bonetti), Jean-Pierre Melville’s Two Men in Manhattan (introduced by Phillip Lopate), and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Truth.

MAD AS HELL: THE MAKING OF NETWORK

Howard Beale gets mad — and asks the American people to join him — in Sidney Lumet’s NETWORK

SCREENING, DISCUSSION & BOOK SIGNING: NETWORK (Sidney Lumet, 1976)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Sunday, February 23, $15, 2:00
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

“Slowly, the world we’re living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my teevee and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’ Well, I’m not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad.” So declares Peter Finch as news anchor Howard Beale in Sidney Lumet’s classic 1976 satire, Network. Written by Paddy Chayefsky, the film, about a fictional television network that will apparently do just about anything for ratings, was nominated for ten Oscars and won four — Finch posthumously beat out castmate William Holden (who plays Max Schumacher, an old-time news pro trying desperately to hold on to any shred of dignity left at the company) for Best Actor, Faye Dunaway won Best Actress as ruthless programmer Diana Christensen, Beatrice Straight was named Best Supporting Actress for her six minutes of screen time as Schumacher’s wife, and Chayefsky won for Best Original Screenplay, his insightful script predicting much of what would happen in the media over the next several decades, and it’s still all frighteningly relevant today. On February 23, the Museum of the Moving Image will be showing Network, with cultural critic David Itzkoff on hand to talk about the film and sign copies of his new book, Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies (February 18, Times Books, $27). “The problems, plural, with television, as enumerated by Paddy Chayefsky,” Itzkoff writes at the beginning of the book, “included but were not limited to: its crassness, its stupidity, its chasing of fads and its embracing of gimmicks; its reduction of all that was distinctive and worthy of celebration in American culture to the basic food groups of game shows, songs, and dances; its compulsion to force everyone watching it to think the same thing at the same time; and its overall lack of artistic integrity. Also, it paid him too little.” Itzkoff is supposed to be joined by ESPN host and onetime Howard Beale impersonator Keith Olbermann, who has been bedridden with shingles this week and whose home Twitter page features the quote “Sorry. Not my day to run the network.”