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

THE PUNK SINGER

Riot grrrl Kathleen Hanna opens up about her life in intimate documentary (photo courtesy of Pat Smear)

THE PUNK SINGER: A FILM ABOUT KATHLEEN HANNA (Sini Anderson, 2013)
IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St., 212-924-7771
Nitehawk Cinema, 136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave., 718-384-3980
Opens Friday, November 29
www.thepunksinger.com

A cofounder of the riot grrrl movement, Kathleen Hanna was an outspoken feminist as she toured the world with Bikini Kill and then Le Tigre starting in 1991. But it all came to a mysterious halt in 2005 when the Portland, Oregon, native suddenly went on what became a long hiatus for undisclosed health reasons. Director Sini Anderson gets to the heart of the matter in the intimate, revealing documentary The Punk Singer: A Film About Kathleen Hanna. Incorporating rousing archival footage and photographs along with new interviews, Anderson, in her feature debut, gets Hanna to open up about her life and career, discussing such influences as Kathy Acker and Gloria Steinem as well as the serious health problem that kept her out of the public eye for five years. Hanna also talks about her childhood, a sexual assault that happened to her best friend, her photography and fashion work in college, her zine writing, and the formation of her bands, along the way always pushing her message. “We didn’t give a shit,” she says about the beginnings of Bikini Kill. “We weren’t making money; we knew we were never going to make money. And it was really important that we made our music. We were on a mission. We were going to do what we did whether we got attention or not.”

Kathleen Hanna gets her message out with Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, and the Julie Ruin

Anderson also speaks with such former and current Hanna bandmates as Johanna Fateman, JD Samson, Kathi Wilcox, and Tobi Vail, musical icons Joan Jett and Kim Gordon, Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein, and Hanna’s husband, Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz; many are interviewed in the back of a snazzy van during a Hanna tribute concert at the Knitting Factory in 2010. Anderson weaves in plenty of music clips that display Hanna’s powerful stage presence, including snippets of such songs as “Rebel Girl,” “White Boy,” “Distinct Complicity,” “Hot Topic,” “Deceptacon,” and “Aerobicide” from Bikini Kill, Le Tigre, and the Julie Ruin. The Punk Singer is a gripping portrait of a fearless, talented woman who continues to do whatever it takes to get her message out. “What is the story of my life?” Hanna says near the end. “I have no fucking idea.” But now, thanks to Anderson, we do, even if that story is still being written. The Punk Singer opens November 29 at the IFC Center and Nitehawk Cinema; Anderson, cinematographer Jennie Jeddry, and editor Bo Mehrad will be at the Nitehawk to participate in Q&As following the 7:30 and 9:55 screenings on Friday night, and Hanna will be at the IFC Center for Q&As moderated by Lizz Winstead after Friday and Saturday’s 7:55 and 9:55 shows. In addition, Hanna will be signing copies of the new album by the Julie Ruin, Run Fast, at 10:00 on Saturday.

SMALL BUSINESS SATURDAY: INDIES FIRST

Multiple locations
Saturday, November 30, free
www.indiebound.org

“Now is the time to be a superhero for independent bookstores,” bestselling author Sherman Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian) wrote in an open letter to “gorgeous book nerds” on September 1. “I want all of us (you and you and especially you) to spend an amazing day hand-selling books at your local independent bookstore on Small Business Saturday (that’s the Saturday after Thanksgiving, November 30 this year, so you know it’s a huge weekend for everyone who, you know, wants to make a living).” And he set out a plan as well: “We book nerds will become booksellers. We will make recommendations. We will practice nepotism and urge readers to buy multiple copies of our friends’ books. Maybe you’ll sign and sell books of your own in the process. I think the collective results could be mind-boggling (maybe even world-changing).” Hundreds of bookstores around the country are participating in the one-day event; here in New York City, more than two dozen authors are scheduled to appear at fifteen locations, including LaShonda Katrice Barnett at 192 Books, Amy Brill, Jon Scieszka, and Matt de la Pena at the Community Bookstore, Paul Zelinsky, Michael Buckley, Ayana Mathis, Jeffrey Rotter, and Justin Torres at Greenlight, Jodi Kantor, Emily Jenkins, and Stefan Merrill Block at powerHouse, and Amy Shearn, Jennifer K. Armstrong, Sarah McCarry, Susannah Cahalan, Emma Straub, Tim O’Mara, Jami Attenberg, and Myke Cole at WORD. As Alexie concludes, “So join the Indie First Movement and help your favorite independent bookstore. Help all indie bookstores. Reach out to them and join the movement. Indies First!”

DONNA UCHIZONO: FIRE UNDERGROUND AND STATE OF HEADS

Donna Uchizono’s revisited STATE OF HEADS will precede world premiere of FIRE UNDERGROUND

FIRE UNDERGROUND / STATE OF HEADS
New York Live Arts
219 West 19th St.
December 4-7, $30, 7:30
212-691-6500
www.newyorklivearts.org
www.donnauchizono.org

In 2010, New York City-based dancer and choreographer Donna Uchizono performed in longing two, the first time in ten years she had taken the stage, convinced by dancer Hristoula Harakas to do so in honor of the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Donna Uchizono Company. Uchizono (Thin Air) will be back onstage again next week for the deeply personal Fire Underground, a New York Live Arts commission that relates the tremendous difficulties she encountered when trying to adopt a child. The piece, which examines the idea of performance itself, is a collaboration with dancer Becky Serrrell-Cyr, lighting designer Joe Levasseur, composer David Shively and photographer Michael Grimaldi and will feature five dancers. The piece will be preceded by an updated version of 1999’s State of Heads, which Uchizono brought back for the recent Oliver Sacks festival at NYLA and will be performed by Serrell-Cyr, Levi Gonzalez, and Harakas, set to music by James Lo and lighting by Stan Pressner. “State of Heads explores the feeling of waiting and the passage of time in the state of hiatus where familiar time and scale are pushed,” she told us in an April twi-ny talk. “Using the separation of the head from the body as a point of departure, in an exploration of disjointedness and the sense of a will apart from the mind driving the movement, surprisingly created a world of endearingly odd characters.” The double bill runs December 4-7 at NYLA; the December 4 performance will be followed by the Stay Late Discussion “Behind Fire Underground” with members of the company, moderated by Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, and the December 5 show will be preceded by the Come Early Panel Conversation “Making Dances in the ’90s Though Today’s Lens” with choreographers Tere O’Connor, John Jasperse, RoseAnne Spradlin, and Uchizono, moderated by Carla Peterson. In addition, Uchizono will lead a Shared Practice workshop on November 30 from 1:00 to 4:00, sharing her creative process with a small class; registration is $20.

STEPHEN WESTFALL ON NEIL WELLIVER

Neil Welliver, “Blueberries in Fissures,” oil on canvas, 1983

National Academy Museum
1083 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Tuesday, November 26, $15, 6:30
212-369-4880
www.nationalacademy.org

The National Academy’s current exhibition, “See It Loud: Seven Post-War American Painters,” on view through January 26, examines a lesser-known group of U.S. artists who, in the years following World War II, walked the fine line between representation and abstraction. “There was very nearly a moral dimension to the opposition between the two aesthetics,” notes senior curator Bruce Weber. The seven artists featured in the exhibition are Leland Bell, Paul Georges, Peter Heinemann, Albert Kresch, Stanley Lewis, Paul Resika, and Neil Welliver. On November 26 at 6:30, Schenectady-born painter, critic, professor, and National Academician Stephen Westfall, a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow and winner of a 2009 Rome Prize in the visual arts, will discuss the work of Welliver (1929-2005), whose large-scale landscapes, including the beautifully composed and somewhat dizzying “Blueberries in Fissures,” are a highlight of the show. The talk will be followed by a screening of artist and collector Rudy Burckhardt’s half-hour documentary, Neil Welliver Painting in Maine. (Also in conjunction with the exhibition, Lewis will be teaching the “Working from the Masters” painting class on December 5; tuition is $200.)

THE CONTENDERS 2013: CUTIE AND THE BOXER

Documentary tells the engaging story of a pair of Japanese artists and the life they have made for themselves in Brooklyn

CUTIE AND THE BOXER (Zachary Heinzerling, 2013)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Tuesday, November 26, 8:00
Series continues through January 16
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.facebook.com/cutieandtheboxer

Zachary Heinzerling’s Cutie and the Boxer is a beautifully told story of love and art and the many sacrifices one must make to try to succeed in both. In 1969, controversial Japanese Neo Dada action painter and sculptor Ushio Shinohara came to New York City, looking to expand his career. According to the catalog for the recent MoMA show “Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde,” which featured four works by Ushio, “American art had seemed to him to be ‘marching toward the glorious prairie of the rainbow and oasis of the future, carrying all the world’s expectations of modern painting.’” Four years later, he met nineteen-year-old Noriko, who had left Japan to become an artist in New York as well. The two fell in love and have been together ever since, immersed in a fascinating relationship that Heinzerling explores over a five-year period in his splendid feature-length theatrical debut. Ushio and Noriko live in a cramped apartment and studio in DUMBO, where he puts on boxing gloves, dips them in paint, and pounds away at large, rectangular canvases and builds oversized motorcycle sculptures out of found materials. Meanwhile, Noriko, who has spent most of the last forty years taking care of her often childlike husband and staying with him through some rowdy times and battles with the bottle, is finally creating her own work, an R. Crumb-like series of drawings detailing the life of her alter ego, Cutie, and her often cruel husband, Bullie. (“Ushi” means “bull” in Japanese.) While Ushio is more forthcoming verbally in the film, mugging for the camera and speaking his mind, the pig-tailed Noriko is far more tentative, so director and cinematographer Heinzerling brings her tale to life by animating her work, her characters jumping off the page to show Cutie’s constant frustration with Bullie.

Ushio Shinohara creates one of his action paintings in CUTIE AND THE BOXER

During the course of the too-short eighty-two-minute film — it would have been great to spend even more time with these unique and compelling figures — the audience is introduced to the couple’s forty-year-old son, who has some issues of his own; Guggenheim senior curator of Asian Art Alexandra Munroe, who stops by the studio to consider purchasing one of Ushio’s boxing paintings for the museum; and Chelsea gallery owner Ethan Cohen, who represents Ushio. But things never quite take off for Ushio, who seems to always be right on the cusp of making it. Instead, the couple struggles to pay their rent. One of the funniest, yet somehow tragic, scenes in the film involves Ushio packing up some of his sculptures — forcing them into a suitcase like clothing — and heading back to Japan to try to sell some pieces. Cutie and the Boxer is a special documentary that gets to the heart of the creative process as it applies both to art and love, focusing on two disparate people who have made a strange yet thoroughly charming life for themselves. Cutie and the Boxer is screening November 26 at 8:00 as part of MoMA’s annual series “The Contenders” and will be followed by a discussion with Heinzerling. “The Contenders,” which consists of exemplary films that MoMA believes will stand the test of time and continues with such films as Haifaa Al-Mansour’s Wadjda, Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station, Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, and Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight.

THREE BY DAVID O. RUSSELL: THE FIGHTER

Brothers Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale) and “Irish” Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) go through good times and bad in THE FIGHTER

Brothers Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale) and “Irish” Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) go through good times and bad in David O. Russell’s THE FIGHTER

THE FIGHTER (David O. Russell, 2010)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Saturday, November 23, free with museum admission, 7:00
Series continues through December 19
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
www.thefightermovie.com

A lot of professional fighters face adversity in and out of the ring, but “Irish” Micky Ward took it to a whole new level on his quest to be welterweight champion of the world, as documented in the winning motion picture The Fighter. Ward (Mark Wahlberg) surrounded himself with his family, with his mother, Allice Eklund (Melissa Leo), as his manager, his half-brother, the Pride of Lowell (for once knocking down Sugar Ray Leonard), Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale), as his trainer, and his many big-haired sisters, including Tar (Erica McDermott), Little Alice (Melissa McMeekin), Pork (Bianca Hunter), Red Dog (Dendrie Taylor), and Beaver (Kate O’Brien), part of the team as well. Despite getting pummeled over and over again and continually finding his brother at a condemned crack house, Micky stands by the family until Dicky is back in prison and Micky finally decides to go with a new promoter. As his stock begins to rise again, he is deeply affected by his separation from his family, who are blaming the parting on his new girlfriend, local bartender Charlene (Amy Adams). Based on the true story of the Ward/Eklund clan of Lowell, Massachusetts, The Fighter is a poignant tale of fighting and family, of love and responsibility. Bale is a whirlwind as the effusive, drug-addicted Dicky, who dreams of helping his brother get a title shot even as he misses training sessions because of his dependence on crack. Leo, who nearly steals the show, is virtually unrecognizable as Alice, who can’t understand why Micky would go with a new crew and has quite a few battles of her own with Charlene. And Walhlberg, who trained for several years to get himself in shape for the film, is strong and solid as the conflicted yet determined potential boxing champion. Director David O. Russell (Three Kings) gives The Fighter a realistic feel, at times echoing the documentary that HBO made about Dicky in the movie, and even hiring Ward’s trainer, Mickey O’Keefe, to play himself. In fact, much of the cast got to meet their real-life counterparts, all of whom loved how they were portrayed onscreen, which is actually quite funny once you see how some of them come off. You don’t have to love boxing to love The Fighter, although fans of the sweet science will be impressed by the carefully choreographed fight scenes, complete with the original HBO commentary (and shot by some of the same cameramen). Nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay, with Leo winning Best Supporting Actress and Bale taking home the trophy for Best Supporting Actor, The Fighter is screening November 23 at the Museum of the Moving Image, kicking off the series “Three by David O. Russell” in anticipation of the December release of his latest film, American Hustle. The series continues December 7-8 with Silver Linings Playbook, followed by a special presentation of American Hustle on December 19, with Russell on hand to discuss it.

WORKS BY HANNA SCHAICH AND JANET BIGGS

Hanna Schaich’s EVELYN is one of three of her works that will mark her New York debut on November 23

Microscope Gallery
4 Charles Pl. at Myrtle Ave.
Saturday November 23, free (suggested donation $6), 7:00
347-925-1433
www.microscopegallery.com

Earlier this year, Brooklyn-based visual artist Janet Biggs teamed up with French-born Montréal installation artist Aude Moreau on a dual show at Smack Mellon as part of the “Brooklyn/Montréal” cultural exchange. Now Biggs is collaborating with German artist Hanna Schaich on a one-night-only project November 23 at Microscope Gallery in Bushwick. The evening will consist of three short films by Schaich, in her New York debut, and two by Biggs, selected by Schaich, followed by an in-depth conversation. The two works by Biggs, Brightness All Around and In the Cold Edge, were both shot during trips to the Arctic and investigate individual identity amid unique, dangerous environments. “There is clearly a performative side to my work that has to do with me physically and psychologically pushing myself or assuming some kind of risk in order to capture the images and action needed for a piece,” Biggs told us in a 2011 twi-ny talk. “I didn’t realize I was such a thrill seeker until I set out to make this kind of work. This part of my process is compelling enough that I often find myself looking for new challenges, although my exploration of the addictive nature of risky behavior is primarily as a witness to someone else’s action and off-camera.”

Janet Biggs fires a warning shot in the frozen north in her short film IN THE COLD EDGE

Schaich, who was born and raised in Berlin but is now based in Brooklyn as well, will be showing Evelyn, a portrait of an elderly woman going for a swim in a pool; Taking Over, which involves an ice-cream truck and an ice-skating rink; and Falling Into, which also deals with ice skating (and the Central Park Zoo). The latter two films evoke Biggs’s journeys to freezing zones, finding a common language between the filmmakers. “My artistic work focuses on body-related video performances and installations,” Schaich explains in her official artist statement. “My body is my tool in my artwork and takes up a large and important part of my conceptual work. Paradoxical action sequences and storylines, and playing with gender and gender roles, are key to my work.” Schaich and Biggs met earlier this year and have become fast friends, so this should be an intimate, fun, and fascinating evening.