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

GHETT’OUT FILM FESTIVAL: KILLER OF SHEEP

KILLER OF SHEEP is part of Ghett’Out Film Festival at BAM

KILLER OF SHEEP (Charles Burnett, 1977)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Tuesday, April 10, 6:50
Series runs April 10-12
212-415-5500
bam.org
www.killerofsheep.com

In 2007, Milestone Films restored and released Charles Burnett’s low-budget feature-length debut, Killer of Sheep, with the original soundtrack intact; the film had not been available on VHS or DVD for decades because of music rights problems that were finally cleared. (The soundtrack includes such seminal black artists as Etta James, Dinah Washington, Little Walter, and Paul Robeson.) Shot on weekends for less than $10,000, Killer of Sheep took four years to put together and another four years to get noticed, when it won the FIPRESCI Prize at the 1981 Berlin Film Festival. Reminiscent of the work of Jean Renoir and the Italian neo-Realists, the film tells a simple story about a family just trying to get by, struggling to survive in their tough Watts neighborhood in the mid-1970s. The slice-of-life scenes are sometimes very funny, sometimes scary, but always poignant, as Stan (Henry Gayle Sanders) trudges to his dirty job in a slaughterhouse in order to provide for his wife (Kaycee Moore) and children (Jack Drummond and Angela Burnett). Every day he is faced with new choices, from participating in a murder to buying a used car engine, but he takes it all in stride. The motley cast of characters, including Charles Bracy and Eugene Cherry, is primarily made up of nonprofessional actors with a limited range of talent, but that is all part of what makes it all feel so real. Killer of Sheep was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1989, the second year of the program, making it among the first fifty to be selected, in the same group as Rebel Without a Cause, The Godfather, Duck Soup, All About Eve, and It’s a Wonderful Life, which certainly puts its place in history in context. Killer of Sheep will be screening on April 10 as part of the Ghett’Out Film Festival at BAM and will be followed by a Q&A with Charles Burnett. The series, which focuses on contemporary low-budget indie French cinema — Killer of Sheep was a major influence on this new French New Wave — continues through April 12 with such films as Jean-Charles Hue’s La BM du seigneur (The Lord’s Ride), Sylvain George’s May They Rest in Revolt (Figures of War) (Qu’ils reposent en révolte), Djinn Carrenard’s $200 Donoma, and Alain Gomis’s L’Afrance.

DISAPPEARING ACT IV: POLICE, ADJECTIVE

Cristi (Dragos Bucur) is on one helluva boring stakeout in Romanian black comedy

POLICE, ADJECTIVE (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2009)
Bohemian National Hall
321 East 73rd St. between First & Second Aves.
Friday, April 13, free, 8:15
Festival runs April 10-22 at Bohemian National Hall, IFC Center, and FIAF
new-york.czechcentres.cz

The first half of Corneliu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective is as dreadfully boring as Detective Cristi’s (Dragos Bucur) assignment, tailing a student, Victor (Radu Costin), who enjoys a joint with two of his friends every day after school. While Cristi wants to nail the kid’s supplier, the cop’s boss has him on a tight deadline, insisting he arrest Victor if the investigation continues to go nowhere, but Cristi strongly disagrees with putting the teenager away for up to seven years for a crime he believes will soon be abolished by the government. However, the film picks up considerably as Cristi seeks help from various contacts, getting caught up in red tape and public servants who would really rather not be bothered. And when he get called in by the chief (Vlad Ivanov from 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days) and gets a long lecture in linguistics, well, you won’t be able to control yourself from laughing out loud. Porumboiu (12:08 East of Bucharest) keeps the pace very slow and very steady, but hang in there, because the end is a riot. Police, Adjective, which won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, screened at the New York Film Festival and at MoMA as part of the “Contenders, 2009,” series, and was Romania’s official entry for the Foreign Language Film Academy Award, is being shown April 13 at the Bohemian National Hall as part of “Disappearing Act IV,” a festival of recent European films that also includes such works as Miguel Gomes’s Our Beloved Month of August (Aquele Querido Mes de Agosto) from Portugal and France, Vaclav Kadrnka’s Eighty Letters (Osmdesat dopisu) from the Czech Republic, Jaroslav Vojtek’s The Border (Hranice) from Slovakia, Argyris Papadimitropoulos and Jan Vogel’s Wasted Youth from Greece, and Marc Bauder’s The System (Das System ― alles verstehen heisst alles verzeihen) from Germany, with many screenings followed by a Q&A with members of the cast and/or crew. The series is curated and produced by Irena Kovarova and presented in association with the Czech Center, the Romanian Cultural Institute, and the Group of European Cultural Institutes and Diplomatic Representations in New York.

VIDEO OF THE DAY: FLOATING POINT WAVES

HERE Arts Center
145 Sixth Ave. at Dominick St.
April 10-14, 8:30, $20
212-647-0202
www.here.org

In January 2011, HERE presented a workshop production of LEIMAY’s Floating Point Waves as part of its annual Culturemart festival. The experimental evening-length piece, which is now having its official premiere at HERE, continuing April 10-14, was conceived and designed by dancer-choreographer Ximena Garnica and video artist Shige Moriya, the duo that runs the New York Butoh Festival, the upcoming inaugural SOAK Festival, and CAVE. Garnica and Moriya are also the masterminds behind LEIMAY, the performance installation company whose previous works include Furnace, Trace of Purple Sadness, and Becoming. In Floating Point Waves, Garnica and Moriya, collaborating with sound composer Jeremy D. Slater and lighting designer Solomon Weisbard, create an immersive, meditative environment that shimmers with shadows and reflections, splashes of color in the darkness, and slow movement through strings and water as a live electronic score plays along with real-time video, coming together to create a mesmerizing experience. Garnica and Moriya will participate in the discussion “Tracing the Art” after the April 10 performance, while the April 11 show will be followed by an audience roundtable.

STREET VIEWS: DECASIA

DECASIA (Bill Morrison, 2002)
Maysles Institute
343 Malcolm X Blvd. between 127th & 128th Sts.
Tuesday, April 10, $10, 7:30
212-582-6050
www.mayslesinstitute.org
www.billmorrisonfilm.com

Experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison’s production company is called Hypnotic Pictures, and for good reason; the Chicago-born, New York-based auteur makes mesmerizing, visually arresting works using archival found footage and eclectic soundtracks that are a treat for the eyes and ears. Several of his films were recently shown at a retrospective at the World Financial Center (including The Miners’ Hymns, Spark of Being, The Great Flood, and his masterpiece, Decasia), but if you missed that last one, you now have another chance to catch it at the Maysles Institute on April 10, where it is screening as part of the “Street Views” series curated by Paul Dallas and Anthony Titus. Made in 2002, Decasia is about nothing less than the beginning and end of cinema. The sixty-seven-minute work features clips from early silent movies that are often barely visible in the background as the film nitrate disintegrates in the foreground, black-and-white psychedelic blips, blotches, and burns dominating the screen. The eyes at first do a dance between the two distinct parts, trying to follow the action of the original works as well as the abstract shapes caused by the filmstrip’s impending death, but eventually the two meld into a single unique narrative, enhanced by a haunting, compelling score by Bang on a Can’s Michael Gordon, which begins as a minimalist soundtrack and builds slowly until it reaches a frantic conclusion. The on-screen destruction might seem random, but it is actually carefully choreographed by Morrison, who wrote, directed, produced, and edited the film. Following the screening, Morrison will participate in a Q&A with architect David Gersten of the Cooper Union, moderated by Titus. “Street Views,” which “explores our connection to the built environment through documentaries, narratives, and experimental works,” continues April 24 with Peter Bo Rappmund’s Psychohydragraphy and concludes April 25 with Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Abendland.

BEING SHAKESPEARE

Simon Callow goes through the seven stages of Shakespeare in one-man show (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. between Ashland & Rockwell Pl.
Through April 14, $25-$100
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Obsessed with William Shakespeare since he was six years old, British actor Simon Callow, now sixty-two, is currently at BAM playing Hermione and Leontes from The Winter’s Tale, Mark Antony and Caesar from Julius Caesar, Jaques, Orlando, and Rosalind from As You Like It, Antipholus from The Comedy of Errors, Falstaff and Prince Henry from Henry IV, Prospero and Miranda from The Tempest, Quince, Flute, Bottom, and Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Kings Henry V, Richard II, and Lear (as well as Queen Margaret), both Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Old Hamlet, and even Shakespeare himself. And he does all that and more in a mere hour and a half in the one-man show Being Shakespeare, written by Bard scholar and Oxford English literature professor Jonathan Bate and directed and designed by Tom Cairns. Built around Jaques’s seven stages of man monologue from As You Like It — “All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players / They have their exits and their entrances / And one man in his time plays many parts / His acts being seven ages” — Being Shakespeare follows the Bard from birth to death, with Callow (Shakespeare in Love, Four Weddings and a Funeral) discussing various aspects of Shakespeare’s personal life, about which precious little is known, and relating them to specific lines and characters from his plays and sonnets. Although there are a handful of Eureka! moments, there are also a lot of comparisons that are too much of a stretch, supposition instead of fact. Bate does include fascinating tidbits about Shakespeare’s sisters, working in his father’s glove-making shop, dealing with lawyers, and marrying the pregnant Anne Hathaway, but the show often feels more like a historical literary lecture than a dramatic play — and, of course, as Hamlet famously intoned, “The play’s the thing.” Callow does a magnificent job at some points, particularly his marvelously entertaining handling of an exchange between Falstaff and Prince Henry about preparing an army unit and the scene in which Peter Quince is casting Pyramus and Thisbe in Dream, but other snippets lack depth and power, perhaps better in idea than in execution. Being Shakespeare might be a treat for Shakespeare fanatics and completists, but it will leave others wanting more. Callow will participate in a postshow talk moderated by Jeff Dolven on April 12, and Bate will be in conversation with Barry Edelstein on April 15 in the BAM Hillman Attic Studio.

SURVIVING PROGRESS

Robert Wright does not exactly predict a bright future for the world in intellectual documentary

SURVIVING PROGRESS (Mathieu Roy & Harold Crooks, 2011)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, April 6
212-924-3363
survivingprogress.com
www.cinemavillage.com

The highly intellectual documentary Surviving Progress begins by evoking Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, cutting from a chimpanzee studying miniature monolithic blocks to an astronaut floating in space. That is followed by author and lecturer Ronald Wright looking our in front of him, carefully considering his words before saying, “In defining progress, I think it’s very important to make a distinction between good progress and bad progress. . . . We tend to delude ourselves that these changes always result in improvements from the human point of view.” Over the course of the next eighty minutes, directors Mathieu Roy (Ecclestone’s Formula) and Harold Crooks (The Corporation) unveil a stream of scientific and cultural experts who explain that change is not always good. Inspired by Wright’s bestselling book A Short History of Progress, the film explores how twenty-first-century advancements have come with increasingly dangerous caveats. “We’re now reaching a point at which technological progress and the increase in our economies and our numbers threaten the very existence of humanity,” Wright explains. Wright is joined by a parade of experts, including author Margaret Atwood, primatologist Jane Goodall, environmental professor Vaclav Smil, the No Impact Project’s Colin Beavan, tour guide Chen Ming, cognitive psychologist Gary Marcus, geneticist and activist David Suzuki, Synthetic Genomics CEO J. Craig Venter, Friends of the Congo’s Kambale Musavuli, and others, who delve into discussions of deforestation and overpopulation, banking and finance, politics and religion, science and nature, evolution and revolution, and the everyday struggles of families across the globe. “We are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history,” theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking says. “But I’m an optimist.” After watching Surviving Progress, it’s not so easy to be filled with any such hope. (Surviving Progress opens April 6 at Cinema Village, with codirector Crooks participating in a Q&A following the 7:00 screening on April 7.)

FIRST SATURDAYS: PARTY OF LIFE

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, April 7, free, 5:00 – 11:00 (some events require free tickets distributed in advance at the Visitor Center)
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

Pennsylvania-born Keith Haring was one of the most influential street artists and activists of his generation. Known for his drawings and sculpture of cartoony characters, Haring redefined public art in New York City, where he moved when he was nineteen in 1978. In conjunction with the recent opening of its exhibit “Keith Haring: 1978-1982,” the Brooklyn Museum is dedicating its free April First Saturday programming to the life and career of Haring, who died in 1990 of AIDS-related complications. There will be guided tours of the exhibition, a break-dance performance by Floor Royalty Crew, workshops where visitors can make Haring-inspired buttons and Pop art prints, an artist talk by photographer Christopher Makos, who documented the street art scene in the 1970s and ’80s, a talk by Will Hermes about his new book, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever, and a dance party hosted by legendary DJ Junior Vasquez. In addition, there will be concerts by the Library Is on Fire and Comandante Zero (with live video) and a screening of Jacob Krupnick’s Girl Walk // All Day (followed by a Q&A with the director and some of the dancers in the film). As always, the galleries will be open late, giving visitors plenty of opportunity to check out the Keith Haring exhibit as well as “Playing House,” “Rachel Kneebone: Regarding Rodin,” “Raw/Cooked: Shura Chernozatonskaya,” “Newspaper Fiction: The New York Journalism of Djuna Barnes, 1913–1919,” “Question Bridge: Black Males,” and “19th-Century Modern.”