Dan Fishback looks back at his childhood and the AIDS epidemic in multidisciplinary THIRTYNOTHING at Dixon Place
Dixon Place
161A Chrystie Pl. between Rivington & Delancey Sts.
Fridays & Saturdays, September 30 – October 22, $15-$20, 7:30 or 9:30
212-219-0736
www.dixonplace.org
A few years ago, we caught Dan Fishback’s outrageously funny You Will Experience Silence at Dixon Place, one of the truly great works about Chanukah. Fishback, who has also presented such shows as The Material World, Absentia Dementia, Waiting for Barbara, and Please Let Me Love You, which take on politics, celebrity, religion, gay culture, and other themes, is staging the solo performance project thirtynothing at Dixon Place on Fridays & Saturdays through October 22. Directed by Stephen Brackett, thirtynothing pulls together stories from Fishback’s childhood along with tales from the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, weaving in work by such seminal artists as Mark Morrisroe and David Wojnarowicz. In conjunction with thirtynothing, Dixon Place will be holding special Sunday conversations ($5 suggested donation, 5:00) on the cultural legacy of AIDS, beginning October 2 with “The Queer Generation Gap” (with Ira Sachs, Jack “Mother Flawless Sabrina” Doroshow, and Carlos Motta) and continuing October 9 with “The Gentrification Age” (with Sarah Schulman), October 16 with “The Films of Mark Morrisroe” (including screenings of Hello from Bertha, The Laziest Girl in Town, and Nymph-O-Maniac), and October 23 with “THIRTYEVERYTHING.” The talks will take place in the lounge, where Fishback has installed a site-specific piece honoring artists who died of AIDS in the 1980s and ’90s. “There is no ritualized means for my generation to mourn our predecessors who were lost to AIDS,” Fishback explains in an online program note. “As a Jew, trained from birth to mourn the obliteration of my ancestors, I feel the impulse to gather my community together, to speak of the dead, to celebrate the triumphs of the past and integrate that history into a sense of who I am. That is the impulse behind this project.”
One of the grandest epics ever made, William Wyler’s Ben-Hur is screening October 1 at Alice Tully Hall as part of the New York Film Festival’s Masterworks sidebar, which also includes Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, Sara Driver’s You Are Not I, and the thirty-seven-film “Velvet Bullets and Steel Kisses: Celebrating the Nikkatsu Centennial.” The digital restoration of Wyler’s remake of Fred Niblo’s 1925 silent version starring Ramón Novarro and Francis X. Bushman (there was also a fifteen-minute Ben Hur made in 1907, all adapted from Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel) celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the eleven-time Oscar winner, which garnered Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Charlton Heston as Judah Ben-Hur), Best Supporting Actor (Hugh Griffith as Sheik Ilderim), Best Score (Miklós Rózsa), Best Cinematography, Best Set Decoration, Best Costume Design, and Best Special Effects, among other trophies. The $15 million blockbuster tells the story of two childhood friends, Judah Ben-Hur and Messala (Stephen Boyd), who get caught up in religion, politics, and slavery in first-century Rome and eventually have a magnificent showdown on the chariot course. As cinema spectacles go, they don’t get much better than this. The special screening at the New York Film Festival will be introduced by Wyler’s daughter Catherine and Heston’s son Fraser.
Writer-director Baltasar Kormákur’s adaptation of Arnaldur Indriðason’s award-winning novel Jar City (Myrin) is a bleak but compelling police procedural that focuses on a fact-based controversial government initiative that is cataloging genetic research on all Icelandic families. When an aging man named Holberg (Thorsteinn Gunnarsson) is murdered in his home, brooding inspector Erlendur (Ingvar E. Sigurdsson) heads the investigation into the death, leading him to a thirty-year-old rape, a dirty cop, a trio of criminals (one of whom has been missing for a quarter century), a woman who killed herself shortly after her four-year-old daughter died, and a doctor who collects body parts. The divorced Erlendur also has to deal with his troubled daughter (Augusta Eva Erlendsdottir), a pregnant drug addict who hangs out with some very sketchy company. Meanwhile, a mysterious man (Atli Rafn Sigurdarson) is up to something following the traumatic death of his young daughter. Kormakur weaves together the story line of the two fathers side by side — in the book, the unidentified man appears only near the conclusion, although who he is still remains a mystery for most of the film — centering on the complex relationship between parents and children and what gets passed down from generation to generation, both on the outside and the inside. Sigurdsson plays Erlendur with a cautious seriousness, the only humor coming from the way he treats his goofy partner, Sigurdur Oli (Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson). Iceland’s entry for the 2007 Foreign-Language Oscar and winner of the Crystal Globe at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Jar City is a dark, tense intellectual thriller. Indriðason has turned Erlendur into a continuing character in such follow-ups as Silence of the Grave and Voices; here’s hoping Kormákur and Sigurdsson do the same. Jar City will be screening on September 22 at 7:20 and 9:30 at BAMcinématek as part of the ongoing “Cinemachat with Elliott Stein” series, with the early showing including a discussion with Stein.