Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Friday, January 11, and Saturday, January 12, $28, 7:30
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org
Japan Society gathers together dancers and choreographers from Tokyo, Kyoto, and Taipei this weekend for the fifteenth annual Contemporary Dance Showcase: Japan + East Asia. Makotocluv founder Makoto Enda, who specializes in environmental performances, teams up with former Dairakudakan dancer Kumotaro Mukai on Misshitsu: Secret Honey Room – Duo Version, what is being called “post-post-post-butoh.” The officially stated goal of Tokyo-based hip-hop superstar Kentaro!! and his company, Tokyo Electrock Stairs, is “to touch your heart and break through it,” and they’ll attempt to do just that with Send It, Mr. Monster, a work set to Japanese pop songs and standards. In Kyoto-based choreographer Kosei Sakamoto’s elegiac Haigafuru~Ash is falling, five members of his Monochrome Circus company move very slowly over a stage continually changing color; the piece was inspired by his personal reaction to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. And in the multimedia, interactive Seventh Sense, Taipei-based choreographer Chieh-hua Hsieh blends sound, movement, and color as his Anarchy Dance Theatre and the audience itself influence motion sensors that reconfigure the space and alter perception. The January 11 show will be followed by a Meet-the-Artists reception.
At the 1985 Cannes Film Festival, producer Menahem Golan, who would go on to make several movies nominated for the Golden Raspberry (Cannonball Run, Cobra), somehow got French auteur Jean-Luc Godard to agree to direct a new version of King Lear, signing the contract on a napkin. Unfortunately, things didn’t go quite as planned, resulting in Godard’s incomprehensible, unintelligible, extremely hard-to-follow Shakespeare flick. Theater director Peter Sellars — he of the Eraserhead-like hairdo — stars as William Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth, a descendant of the Bard’s who is trying to put his famous ancestor’s plays back together in a post-Chernobyl world. After Norman and Kate Mailer get in an argument about turning the script into a gangster picture, Sellars meets Learo (a muttering Burgess Meredith) and his daughter, Cordelia (a monotone Molly Ringwald). Also on hand for this twisted fairy tale are French director Leos Carax (Pola X, Holy Motors) as Edgar, Julie Delpy as Virginia, Woody Allen as Mr. Alien, and Godard himself as the wacky Professor Pluggy. Elements of the play occasionally show up, but it is nearly impossible to figure out just what the hell is going on. By the time it all starts making the least bit of sense and even becomes intriguingly poetic, it’s over. In his inimitable style, Godard subversively defies all expectations, making a film that is about everything, nothing, and no thing. He takes on virtue and power, art and nature, text and image, and storytelling itself, but in this case he ends up with an unwatchable mess. Still not available on DVD, King Lear is having a rare screening January 11 at 7:00 and 9:30 at 92YTribeca, with the early show followed by a Q&A with critics Simon Abrams, Bilge Ebiri, and Richard Brody. When he selected the film for the 2009 New Yorker Festival, Brody wrote, “I consider Godard’s King Lear to be his greatest artistic achievement; in a Y2K poll, I ranked it among the ten best movies ever made.” It should be quite interesting hearing him defend that choice on Friday night.
A bunch of people have a whole lot to say about Ed Koch in a new documentary about the charming yet irascible former three-term mayor of New York City, but none of them goes on quite so eloquently as Hizzoner himself. Longtime journalist and first-time filmmaker Neil Barsky delves into the man behind the legend, the upstart politician who helped save New York from the debt- and crime-ridden 1970s through, among other things, the sheer force of his immense will. Barsky combines new interviews with such political journalists as Michael Goodwin, Sam Roberts, and Wayne Barrett, along with former comptroller Carl McCall and the Rev. Calvin O. Butts, to paint a portrait of Koch as both mensch and meanie, a bully who always speaks his mind and never backs down from a challenge. Barsky and editor Juliet Weber include archival photographs and old film footage of Koch in the 1960s and early 1970s as he first takes on Democratic Party boss Carmine DeSapio, then runs for city council and Congress before getting into a heated seven-person race for mayor in 1977. The present-day Koch is filmed tinkering around in his small kitchen, breaking the Yom Kippur fast with his family, and relaxing in his office, sharing his views on his legacy, his battles with the black community over Sydenham Hospital, and even questions of his sexuality — but only up to a point — that have followed him throughout his career. Although Barsky claims in his director’s statement that “with the exception of one former governor and one former mayor, virtually everyone we reached out to agreed to be interviewed,” the film suffers in that it does not exactly boast an all-star lineup of pundits talking about Koch– but it of course has Koch himself, and that is more than enough. Koch, which opens theatrically February 1, is screening January 10 and 13 at the twenty-second annual New York Jewish Film Festival, presented by the Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, with Barsky on hand for the January 10 show and the now-eighty-nine-year-old Koch in attendance January 13.
French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve’s third film is an infuriating yet captivating tale that runs hot and cold. Goodbye First Love begins in Paris in 1999, as fifteen-year-old Camille (Lola Créton) frolics naked with Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky), her slightly older boyfriend. While she professes her deep, undying lover for him, he refuses to declare his total dedication to her, instead preparing to leave her and France for a long sojourn through South America. When Camille goes home and starts sobbing, her mother (Valérie Bonneton), who is not a big fan of Sullivan’s, asks why. “I cry because I’m melancholic,” Camille answers, as only a fifteen-year-old character in a French film would. As the years pass, Camille grows into a fine young woman, studying architecture and dating a much older man (Magne-Håvard Brekke), but she can’t forget Sullivan, and when he eventually reenters her life, she has some hard choices to make. Créton (Bluebeard) evokes a young Isabelle Huppert as Camille, while Urzendowsky (The Way Back) is somewhat distant as the distant Sullivan. There is never any real passion between them; Hansen-Løve (All Is Forgiven, 
One of six films to be awarded the Grand Prix at the inaugural Cannes Film Festival in 1946, Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City is an antiwar masterpiece, the first of three works that together form his War Trilogy, along with Paisan and Germany Year Zero. Begun in January 1945 with Italy still under German occupation, Rome Open City melds neorealism with melodrama in telling the story of a small, tight-knit community secretly battling the Nazis. The leader of the local Italian resistance is Giorgio Manfredi (Marcello Pagliero), an engineer sending messages and money through courier Don Pietro (Aldo Fabrizi), a priest who is generally left alone by the Nazis and the Italian police. Giorgio hides away in his friend Francesco’s (Francesco Grandjacquet) apartment as Francesco prepares to marry Pina (Anna Magnani), a pregnant widow raising a son, Marcello (Vito Annicchiarico), who is part of a gang of young kids also fighting in the resistance and causing a surprising amount of trouble. Meanwhile, Giorgio’s former flame, cabaret performer Marina Mari (Maria Michi), is cozying up to Ingrid (Giovanna Galletti), a suspicious woman with ties to the Nazis, who are led by the relentless Major Bergmann (Harry Feist). With events coming to a head, faith is questioned, and betrayals set in motion violence, torture, and killings that brutally characterize the many horrors of war. Written by Sergio Amidei and Federico Fellini, Rome Open City is a remarkable example of guerrilla filmmaking, with Rossellini and cinematographer Ubaldo Arata shooting on the streets of Rome using whatever dupe negatives they could get their hands on. The mix of professional and nonprofessional actors lends a stark reality to the proceedings. “Above all, the concept was to give an honest account, to show things as they were,” Rossellini explained in a 1963 intro to the film, a staggering achievement that seems to only get better with age. Rome Open City is screening January 4 at 7:00 as part of the Rubin Museum Cabaret Cinema series “Urban Landscapes,” held in conjunction with the exhibition “Radical Terrain: Modernist Art from India,” and will be introduced by David Bragdon of the city Parks Department. The brief series also includes Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad and Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse and Red Desert later this month.