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

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL: A TOUCH OF SIN

Zhao San (Wang Baoqiang) is one of four protagonists who break out into sudden acts of shocking violence in Jia Zhangke’s A TOUCH OF SIN

A TOUCH OF SIN (TIAN ZHU DING) (Jia Zhangke, 2013)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Alice Tully Hall, 1941 Broadway at 65th St.
Saturday, September 28, 6:00
Francesca Beale Theater, 144 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Wednesday, October 2, 8:30
Festival runs September 27 – October 13
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.com

During his sixteen-year career, Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke has made both narrative works (The World, Platform, Still Life) and documentaries (Useless, I Wish I Knew), with his fiction films containing elements of nonfiction and vice versa. Such is the case with his latest film, the powerful A Touch of Sin, which explores four based-on-fact outbreaks of shocking violence in four different regions of China. In Shanxi, outspoken miner Dahai (Jiang Wu) won’t stay quiet about the rampant corruption of the village elders. In Chongqing, married migrant worker and father Zhao San (Wang Baoqiang) obtains a handgun and is not afraid to use it. In Hubei, brothel receptionist Ziao Yu (Zhao Tao, Jia’s longtime muse and now wife) can no longer take the abuse and assumptions of the male clientele. And in Dongguan, young Xiao Hui (Luo Lanshan) tries to make a life for himself but is soon overwhelmed by his lack of success. Inspired by King Hu’s 1971 wuxia film A Touch of Zen, Jia also owes a debt to Max Ophüls’s 1950 bittersweet romance La Ronde, in which a character from one segment continues into the next, linking the stories. In A Touch of Sin, there is also a character connection in each successive tale, though not as overt, as Jia makes a wry, understated comment on the changing ways that people connect in modern society. In depicting these four acts of violence, Jia also exposes the widening economic gap between the rich and the poor and the social injustice that is prevalent all over contemporary China — as well as the rest of the world — leading to dissatisfied individuals fighting for their dignity in extreme ways. A gripping, frightening film that earned Jia the Best Screenplay Award at Cannes this year, A Touch of Sin is an official selection of the fifty-first New York Film Festival, screening September 28 at Alice Tully Hull and October 2 at the Francesca Beale Theater, with Jia and Zhao participating in a Q&A following the first show. (The film then opens October 4 at Lincoln Plaza and the IFC Center.)

BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVAL 2013

Brooklyn Borough Hall and Plaza (and other venues)
209 Joralemon St.
Sunday, September 22, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
www.brooklynbookfestival.org

The eighth annual Brooklyn Book Festival arrives in the world’s best borough September 22 with more than a hundred panel discussions, readings, signings, live performances, workshops, and other special literary events. Below are our can’t-miss picks for a festival that is growing in popularity every year; among the myriad other participants are Sonia Sanchez, Hilton Als, Edwidge Danticat, Pete Hamill, Meg Wolitzer, Claire Messud, Colum McCann, Francesca Lia Block, David Levithan, William C. Rhoden, Touré, Alan Light, Katherine Applegate, Phillip Lopate, Jane Friedman, Jonathan Ames, Sapphire, Tao Lin, Francine Prose, Leonard Lopate, Nicholson Baker, Ben Katchor, Anders Nilsen, A. M. Homes, Meg Cabot, Rebecca Miller, Lemon Andersen, Quincy Troupe, Katherine Applegate, and Donald and Nina Crews.

10:00 am, “Love to Laugh? Loud and Long and Clear?,” with Jeff Smith, Sherri Winston, and Michael Buckley moderated by Eric Luper, Youth Stoop, Borough Hall Plaza / Columbus Park

11:00 am, “Who? New!,” with debut novelists A. X. Ahmad, Caleb Crain, Ursula DeYoung, Michele Forbes, and Ayana Mathis, Borough Hall Courtroom

12 noon, “The World (According to Cartoonists): Border Crossing Comics,” with Adrian Tomine, Rutu Modan, Dash Shaw, and David Prudhomme, moderated by Kent Worcester, St. Francis Auditorium

1:00, “Sin City,” with K’wan Foye, Albert “Prodigy” Johnson, Ivy Pochoda, and Miasha, moderated by S. J. Rozan, Borough Hall Courtroom

2:00, “Love, Villainy, Ethics, and Karaoke: Chuck Klosterman and Rob Sheffield in Conversation,” moderated by Ed Park, Borough Hall Plaza Main Stage

3:00, “The Secret Lives of Girls,” with Lauren Myracle, Meg Cabot, and Sharon M. Draper, moderated by Mitali Dave, Youth Stoop, Borough Hall Plaza / Columbus Park

4:00, “Art Spiegelman and Jules Feiffer in Conversation,” moderated by Benjamen Walker, St. Francis Auditorium

5:00, “Let’s Talk About (Writing) Sex,” with Sam Lipsyte, Amy Grace Loyd, and Susan Choi, moderated by Angela Ledgerwood, Borough Hall Plaza Main Stage

WHO IS JACK GOLDSTEIN?

Jack Goldstein, A BALLET SHOE, 16mm film, color, silent, 1975 (Courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne and the Estate of Jack Goldstein)

The Jewish Museum
1109 Fifth Ave. at 92nd St.
Sunday, September 22, $12, 12:30 – 4:30
Exhibition continues Thursday – Tuesday through September 29, $15 (free admission Saturday 11:00 am – 5:45 pm, pay-what-you-wish Thursday 5:00 – 8:00)
212-423-3200
www.thejewishmuseum.org
www.jackgoldstein-artist.com

In 1973, multimedia artist Jack Goldstein made the short film Jack, in which he, as cameraman, backs away from a man in a desolate landscape who repeatedly calls out, “Jack,” over and over and over again as he fades into the distance. It’s a critical piece in the first American museum retrospective of Goldstein’s work, “Jack Goldstein x 10,000,” which continues through September 29 at the Jewish Museum. The self-destructive Goldstein was known for disappearing during the course of his career, both in his art and in his life, and the Jewish Museum has been examining the iconoclastic figure in a series of programs that have included the exhibition walk-through “What Is Jack Goldstein?” and the panel discussions “Where Is Jack Goldstein?” and “How Is Jack Goldstein?” The museum has saved the best for last, as the final program takes place on September 22, the afternoon symposium “Who Is Jack Goldstein?,” which features a prestigious collection of artists and historians talking about Goldstein’s influence and legacy: Morgan Fisher, Robert Longo, Matt Mullican, Troy Brauntuch, Kathryn Andrews, and Paul Pfeiffer, moderated by Julia Robinson and Claire Bishop. The exhibition itself comprises many of Goldstein’s films in addition to sculpture, sound installations, paintings, and writings. The works display Goldstein’s unique mix of wit and anxiety: In the eight-minute video A Spotlight, Goldstein runs around a room trying to avoid a spotlight, while in the “Burning Window” installation, flickering candles make it seem like a fire is raging behind a window, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.

Jack Goldstein, “Untitled,” acrylic on canvas, 1981 (collection Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond J. Learsy)

Goldstein strips things down to their bare elements in such shorts as Shane, in which a German shepherd barks for three minutes, and A Ballet Shoe, in which two hands tie a ballet shoe on a ballerina’s foot. A series of instructions explains how others can stage some of Goldstein’s performances and installations, once again adding to his theme of the artist’s disappearance. In the mid-to-late-1980s, Goldstein, a heroin addict who was born in Canada in 1945 and spent time in New York before moving to California, where he studied with John Baldessari and became associated with the Pictures Generation, created colorful abstract canvases using appropriated images, the works melding science, computer technology, and psychedelia. The exhibit ends with extracts from Goldstein’s writing — influenced by his penchant for reading philosophy books backward — in which he experimented with new word-processing techniques and repurposed words from other writers in order to form his own personal narrative. In a 1985 interview with the Tate’s Chris Dercon, Goldstein, who hanged himself in his backyard in 2003 at the age of fifty-eight, said, “You wake up in the morning and look at yourself and go, ‘Who is that?’ and ‘What is that?’ and ‘What do you call it?’ and ‘What’s my name?,’” later adding, “My name, it’s the name of a name. It’s not my name. . . . Imagine, if you look in the telephone book, there must be ten thousand Jack Goldsteins.” This revealing survey goes a long way toward establishing just who this Jack Goldstein is, although all of the mysteries are likely never to be solved.

AFTER TILLER

Dr. Susan Robinson has to make difficult choices when deciding whether to perform a late abortion

AFTER TILLER (Martha Shane & Lana Wilson, 2013)
Film Forum, 209 West Houston St., 212-727-8110
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 212-875-5600
Opens Friday, September 20
www.aftertillermovie.com

In After Tiller, directors and producers Martha Shane and Lana Wilson manage to humanize one of the most contentious, controversial, and complicated issues of our age: late abortion. In May 2009, Dr. George Tiller, who specialized in third-trimester abortions, was assassinated in front of his clinic in Wichita, Kansas. That left only four doctors in the United States who performed late abortions, each of whom had either trained or worked with Dr. Tiller. “It was absolutely no question in any of our minds that we were going to keep on doing his work,” one of those four doctors, Susan Robinson, says in the film. As After Tiller begins, Dr. Robinson works with Dr. Shelley Sella at Southwestern Women’s Options in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Dr. LeRoy Carhart is a former U.S. Air Force colonel who operates the Abortion & Contraception Clinic of Nebraska, and Dr. Warren Hern is director of the Boulder Abortion Clinic in Colorado. Shane and Wilson follow these four dedicated doctors who continue doing their work despite the personal danger associated with their profession, including harassment, murder, assault, and bombings. “When I walk out the door, I expect to be assassinated,” Dr. Hern says. The filmmakers show the doctors in their offices, meeting with women who are requesting late abortions for various reasons; Shane and Wilson also follow the abortion providers into their homes as they go on with their daily lives, offering an intimate portrait of these men and women who are so often called monsters but are firm in their belief that what they are doing is important and absolutely necessary, performing their jobs with care and understanding. However, Dr. Hern wonders if he should stop providing late abortions and just settle down peacefully with his new wife and adopted son, while Dr. Carhart and his wife opt to move out of Nebraska after a law change and meet resistance as they try to move their clinic to Maryland or Virginia.

Dr. Warren Hern is one of only four doctors in America who provides late abortions

The film also reveals that deciding to perform a late abortion is often an extremely difficult choice for the doctors as well as the patients and not something the providers do automatically when a woman comes to them. One of the most compelling scenes occurs when Drs. Sella and Robinson have a heart-wrenching disagreement over whether to proceed with a late abortion for a young woman, evaluating whether her reason is valid enough and lamenting that the ability of the woman to tell her story could affect the final decision. It’s a pivotal moment that also brings into focus the concerns of the American people; while less than one percent of the abortions performed in the country occur in the third trimester, the procedure is often the centerpiece of the antiabortion movement, but even pro-choice supporters will find themselves questioning the efficacy of all late abortions. The women come to the doctors for many reasons, ranging from the health of the child to economic situations to admitting that they either didn’t know or refused to accept that they were pregnant until it was too late. “It’s guilt no matter which way you go,” one desperate patient, whose child would be born with severe disabilities and would likely die within a year, tells Dr. Sella. “Guilt if you go ahead and do what we’re doing, or bring him into this world and then he doesn’t have any quality of life.” Although Shane and Wilson include footage of protestors, news reports, and congressional hearings, After Tiller is a powerful, deeply emotional documentary about the doctors and patients who must make impossible choices and live with their decisions for the rest of their lives. The film, which raises fascinating, difficult questions for which there are no easy answers, opens September 20 at Film Forum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Shane (Bi the Way) and Wilson will be at Film Forum on September 20-21 at the 8:10 screenings and September 22 at 4:30 to discuss the film; they will also participate in a series of Q&As at Lincoln Center, including September 20 at 7:00 with NARAL Pro-Choice New York, September 21 at 7:00 with the New York Abortion Access Fund, September 22 at 3:00 with Nancy Northup of the Center for Reproductive Rights, and September 26 at 7:00 with Dr. Sara Miller of the Reproductive Health Access Project, in addition to a panel discussion on September 23 at 7:00 with Kassi Underwood of Exhale.

JAMES TURRELL

James Turrell’s “Aten Reign” bathes the Guggenheim in meditative colored light display (photo by David Heald / © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York)

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Friday – Wednesday through September 25, $18-$22 (pay-what-you-wish Saturday 5:45-7:45)
212-423-3587
www.guggenheim.org

During the last few years, the Guggenheim has staged several exhibitions in which the bays that line the winding interior have remained empty. In 2010, Tino Sehgal had trained men and women speak with visitors making their way to the top, with no physical art present at all. In 2011, Maurizio Cattelan’s career retrospective, “All,” consisted of an amalgamation of his works hung from the ceiling like a massive mobile, with nothing in the bays. Now James Turrell has created the site-specific “Aten Reign,” a dazzling, meditative spectacle in which five rings of light that echo the museum’s shape, beginning at the oculus at the top of the rotunda, slowly change colors in mystifying and intoxicating ways. Visitors have access only to the main floor and the first section of the spiraling ramp, with special arched benches at the bottom for more comfortable viewing, but make sure to walk around, as the display, which explores light, space, and perception, seemingly shifts form ever so slightly when seen from different positions and angles, affected by the natural daylight as well. Constructed with interlocking cones and LED fixtures, “Aten Reign” is like one of Turrell’s Skyscapes (such as his open-air “Meeting” at MoMA PS1) mixed with more subdued elements of the psychedelic Joshua Light Show while incorporating the Gazfeld effect. “I really felt to be using light as a material [is] to work or affect the medium of perception,” the L.A.-born Turrell explains in a promotional video. “For me, it’s trying to orient toward what the perception really is, rather than the object of perception, to actually, sort of, remove that. I have an art that has no image. It has no object. And even very little a place of focus, or one place to look. So, without image, without object, without specific focus, what do you have left? Well, a lot of it is this idea of seeing yourself see, understanding how we perceive.” The overall individual, hallucinatory experience grows the more you immerse yourself in its splendor, allowing it to take you to other places in your mind, body, and spirit. Take your time and let it envelop you, not worrying about anything else anywhere in the world.

James Turrell, “Afrum I (White),” projected light, 1967 (photo by David Heald / © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York)

The show is supplemented with several rooms of other works, including a series of white-light pieces from the late 1960s that play with physical space and altered reality; “Prado (White)” appears to be a rectangular hole in the wall, “Afrum I (White)” looks like a floating cube, and the vertical “Ronin” has a special trick to it. Expect a ridiculously long line to see 1976’s “Iltar,” a mysterious wall piece that you’re not allowed to get too close to; don’t ask the guard what it actually is, because he’s not allowed to tell you. The Guggenheim is also screening a pair of short exhibition-related films, David Howe’s James Turrell, Second Meeting Art21 Exclusive and Peter Vogt and Erin Wright’s James Turrell’s Roden Crater, which examine other works by the artist; on September 20 they will be joined by Carine Asscher’s Passageways: James Turrell. Also on September 20, the afternoon symposium “James Turrell: Sensing Space” will feature presentations by Thomas Crow, Miwon Kwon, and Mark Taylor and a panel discussion moderated by exhibition co-curator Nat Trotman. Expect extended wait times for the last week of the much-talked-about show, which closes September 25, but it’s well worth it.

ART SEEN / LOCAL COLOR: 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)
Nitehawk Cinema
136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry St. & Wythe Ave.
Thursday, September 19, 7:30
718-384-3980
www.nitehawkcinema.com
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 September 19 at 7:30 as part of two Nitehawk Cinema monthly series, “Art Seen” and “Local Color,” and will be followed by a Q&A with the director. “Art Seen” continues September 21-22 with Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Ben Rivers’s Slow Action, while “Local Color” returns October 30 with Amy Nicholson’s Zipper.

MIXER READING AND MUSIC SERIES: LUCY CORIN, ALINA SIMONE, AND RAYYA ELIAS

Rayya Elias will read from her memoir and play a twenty-minute set at free Mixer series at Cake Shop on September 18 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Cake Shop
152 Ludlow St.
Wednesday, September 18, free, 7:00
212-253-0036
www.cake-shop.com

Hosts Melissa Febos and Rebecca Keith have put together another eclectic collection of writers for this month’s edition of the Mixer Reading and Music Series, taking place September 18 at 7:00 at Cake Shop. Lucy Corin will be reading from her new collection, One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses (McSweeney’s, August 2013), Alina Simone will share parts of her latest novel, Note to Self (Faber & Faber, June 2013), and Rayya Elias will be delving into her debut, Harley Loco: A Memoir of Hard Living, Hair, and Post-Punk from the Middle East to the Lower East Side (Viking, April 2013). In addition, Elias, who has been a hair stylist to the stars, a punk rocker, a homeless woman, a drug addict, and an incarcerated prisoner during her remarkable life, will be playing a twenty-minute set of songs that serve as the soundtrack to her book.