SHEEP #1
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
November 4-7, $23
212-715-1258 www.japansociety.org
Shortly after crash landing in the Sahara Desert, the isolated pilot narrator of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince recalls, “You can imagine my surprise when I was awakened at daybreak by a funny little voice saying, ‘Please . . . Draw me a sheep . . .’” After several failures, the pilot draws a picture of a crate, explaining that the sheep is inside. The boy, aka the little prince, is very happy, noting, “Where I live, everything is very small.”
Japan-born, Brooklyn-based visual artist Sachiyo Takahashi uses that section of Saint-Exupéry’s classic book, which also explores differences between grown-ups and children, in Sheep #1, which runs November 4–7 at Japan Society. Sachiyo tells the story using small puppets from Nekaa Lab, which she founded in 2006, projected onto a screen to make them look life-size (or bigger). The cast includes Sheep, who claims not to act but to play, and Rabbit, who says Nekaa Lab is “an eternal playground for the curious mind.” Among the other lab members (stuffed toys and figurines) are Cat and Polar Bear.
Sheep #1 is an example of Sachiyo’s Microscopic Live Cinema-Theatre, which tells stories using objects, live music, and camera projections and is able to, in Cat’s words, “even magnify the hidden emotions.” The wordless show, which made its US debut at the Tank in 2018, will be performed and projected live by Sachiyo, with pianist Emile Blondel playing original music with excerpts from Franz Schubert on Friday and Saturday and bassist Kato Hideki playing an original score on Thursday and Sunday, accompanying Sachiyo’s electroacoustic soundtrack.
The opening-night show will be followed by a reception with the artists. Sachiyo, who has been awarded several grants from the Jim Henson Foundation, has previously staged such works as Everything Starts from a Dot and Not Outside, which also starred Sheep, in addition to performing as Miya Okamoto in such Shinnai-bushi sung-storytelling presentations as Shinnai Meets Puppetry: One Night in Winter and the upcoming The Emotions.
BULLETPROOF (Todd Chandler, 2020)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Opens Friday, October 29
212-660-0312 nyc.metrograph.com
There’s a powerful moment near the end of Todd Chandler’s Bulletproof that I won’t soon forget. It takes place at a shooting range, where an employee is sweeping up hundreds of spent shells from guns fired by teachers and parents learning how to defend themselves in the event of a school shooting. The casings evoke the many horrific deaths of children around the country who’ve been killed just because they went to class that day, their stories swept away as the next massacre awaits.
Bulletproof sounds like a thriller, and in many ways it is. When I was a kid, we were taught to duck and cover, hiding under our desks or in the halls to survive a nuclear threat that, fortunately, never came to fruition. But today’s children face a far greater danger from school shootings, although one person in the film does note that they are more likely to die in an airplane crash than by a bullet in school. Chandler (Flood Tide,A Debtors’ Prison) and cinematographer Emily Topper (After Tiller,The Departure) travel to schools in Missouri, Texas, Chicago, Pittsburgh, California, Colorado, and New York, filming shooter drills, local hearings, and presentations from safety officers that use scare tactics and fear to convince districts they need to hire armed security guards and give the teachers guns. “The threat always comes from inside,” a Texas principal says. Another man explains, “Some people will say, ‘That’s just some kid playing,’ but the problem is, we can’t take that risk anymore.” Chandler intercuts scenes of kids just being kids, learning math, going to homecoming, and kicking a ball around.
The Texas principal boasts of having spent forty thousand dollars on twenty-two AR-15s for nineteen security officers. A Pittsburgh policeman is met with resistance when he blames school shootings on prescription SSRIs. Teachers play a life-size video game placing them in the middle of a mass shooting in a gym. A man shows off an all-pervasive surveillance system. A young Bay Area tech worker postpones getting her Master’s and instead starts making bulletproof Kevlar Wonder Hoodies. A school safety convention in Las Vegas reveals capitalism at its best as companies push bulletproof whiteboards and desks, safety lockers displayed in a colorful toylike diorama, and an electronic flashbang that can be used as a distraction device. They are all marketing to panic and monetizing trauma, but you can still take a selfie with a pair of scantily clad women in blue sequins.
Chandler doesn’t speak with any talking-head experts or pundits; instead, Bulletproof is more of a fly-on-the-wall Maysles-like documentary in which the audience gets more than a peek at how the plague of school shootings is being dealt with in these local communities. There are no statistics, no news reports, no debates over guns and the NRA; none of the participants in the film are identified, primarily because they are us, and we are them. America is in crisis, and, as Chandler shows, much of America has gone into crisis mode, to the extreme, when it comes to addressing school shootings, of which, according to CNN, there have been 180 since 2009, with 365 victims.
Are any of these security measures going to work? Chandler might not answer that question directly, but the image of a broom sweeping shell casings like so many dead bodies makes a strong point.
Bulletproof opens October 29 at Metrograph, with Chandler on hand for Q&As at the 8:30 screening on Friday night and the 7:00 show on November 1, when he will be joined by fellow documentarian Kirsten Johnson (Cameraperson,Dick Johnson Is Dead).
Nazi leader Albert Speer tries to whitewash history in Speer Goes to Hollywood
SPEER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD (Vanessa Lapa, 2021)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, October 29
212-727-8110 filmforum.org speergoestohollywood.com
In 2014, Belgium-born, Israel-based documentarian Vanessa Lapa made her feature-length debut with The Decent One, in which she painted a frightening portrait of Heinrich Himmler, using the private diary of the Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (Himmler’s official title). She has now followed that film with Speer Goes to Hollywood, which incorporates archival footage from the Nuremberg trials and clips from propaganda films accompanying forty hours of recordings made in 1971 by up-and-coming British screenwriter Andrew Birkin as he worked with convicted Nazi leader Albert Speer, known as Hitler’s Architect, collaborating on a screenplay for Paramount Pictures based on the former Reichsminister of Munitions’ bestselling memoir, Inside the Third Reich.
Birkin, the brother of model and actress Jane Birkin and whose mentors include Stanley Kubrick and Carol Reed, met with Speer in the latter’s country home in Heidelberg in the winter of 1971. Birkin kept the tape rolling as he and Speer carefully reviewed every scene in the screenplay, as Speer tries to whitewash many of the more outrageous and gruesome details regarding his culpability in the Nazis’ reign of terror while Birkin tries to not let him off the hook.
“I would be careful,” Reed (The Third Man,Oliver!) warns Birkin over the phone after reviewing the first draft of the script. “You can’t build without him knowing. The man holds his mind blank to that. This is not a sweet man.”
Tall and elegant, Speer seizes control of the narrative again and again, claiming to be a dreamer and making sure he is seen with his dog, as if he’s just a normal guy. “I want a private life too,” he opines. He considers war “an adventure” and the Nazi regime “just good fun” to downplay the piles of murdered bodies the Third Reich left in its wake. He refers to the tortured prisoners of war in factories and the concentration camps as workmen and laborers, making excuses that argue that the negative aspects of what the Nazis did have been exaggerated. “I did not know what crimes I’m committing,” he claims. He explains that the “camps were necessary” and blames his Labor Department head, Fritz Sauckel, for the mistreatment of the Jews and other captives under his watch. “I was not responsible for those things. It was him,” he points out.
All the while, Birkin attempts to convince himself that he is doing the right thing by sharing Speer’s story on film. “I’ve been saying all along that I find it easy to identify myself with you,” he tells Speer. “The only point where I think I would have opted out would have been if I had been present or if I witnessed a scene that involved children being carted off. Can you ever remember a situation where you either read about, or more probably heard about, children being separated up or families being torn apart? Anything. Can you ever remember anything that happened? Even if, at the time, you were able to rationalize it?” Speer says no, “But . . . Yes, well, but you know, small things are now seen as the center of a thing. But I’m sorry. It would be wrong to say now I had a sentimental reaction or so. Your idea of the film and of my person that I had any reaction is wrong.”
Speer talks about Himmler, Hermann Göring, and Joseph Goebbels and admits to being one of Hitler’s best friends — and still claims he did not know what was going on despite his heavy involvement with the Mathausen camp and his visit to Auschwitz. “Indirectly, I knew from Hitler that he was planning to annihilate the Jewish people. He said it quite often. But I had no direct knowledge until ’44.” Seeking to garner some sympathy, he says, “If ever I can get rid of the guilt, and quite often I was thinking that I never shall get rid of it, that this burden will ever last with me.”
Albert Speer is profiled in new documentary built around revelatory footage
Birkin might want to give Speer the benefit of the doubt to some degree, but it’s hard for viewers to see anything but a twisted man who lacks empathy and compassion for his fellow human being, lording his sense of superiority over all others, trying to skirt his responsibilities during the war and rewrite history — a project that cannot help but make one reflect on the way America is these days when it comes to slavery, remembering the Holocaust, removing public statues of the founding fathers, tearing apart immigrant families at the border, and changing textbooks to present partisan views of the nation’s past.
Explaining one of Kubrick’s arguments, Birkin (The Name of the Rose,The Cement Garden) says the director told him, “I would find it very difficult to do the film if your character, the Speer in the film, you still made out that he didn’t know what was going on.” Speer just wanted a normal life, reveling in his being called “the good Nazi,” but as Lapa’s film shows, there is not a whole lot of good in him.
Winner of the Israeli Oscar for Best Documentary, Speer Goes to Hollywood is a chilling work that gets into the mind of one of the twentieth century’s most terrifying figures. Lapa and producer Tomer Eliav will be at Film Forum for the 7:00 shows on October 29 and 30 for Q&As that will dig even deeper into this extraordinary story.
Who:Rourou Ye,Wendy Perron What: Virtual Q&A about online exhibition Where:digitaldance.space When: Thursday, October 28, free with RSVP, 7:30 Why: “When I returned to the dance studio again in April 2021, I felt weird,” multidisciplinary artist Rourou Ye said about working during the pandemic. “The studio was empty. Not only because there was no one else there but because it also lacked the characteristics and stories inherent to one’s surroundings. What can I do with this space? There was nothing I could play with, and it made me the center of attention. I was motionless. So I went back home to create dances through video.” On October 28 at 7:30, the Chinese-born, US-based artist, who incorporates dance, shadow puppetry, everyday objects, and multimedia technology into works that defy reality, will discuss her process with teacher, writer, dancer, choreographer, and Dance magazine editor at large Wendy Perron over Zoom.
They will be delving into Ye’s online exhibition, “May I Dance on Your Screen?,” which continues through December 31 with such dance films as Daydreaming (“How can I duplicate myself so I can have a dance companion?”), Dis/Placed, (“How can I appear in my collaborator’s space even though I’m physically in another location?”), and I Followed the Moon to the River, My Far-Flung Home (“It’s been so long since I’ve been home . . .”). The program is part of the seventh annual Dancing Futures: Artist and Mentor Collaborative Residency, which “offers emerging Bronx-based and/or dance artists of color with resources, performance opportunities, mentorship, and documentation to strengthen and shine a spotlight on the Bronx as a creative incubator of new dance and performance work.”
Who:David Godlis,Lucy Sante What: Book launch with live discussion Where:Rizzoli Bookstore, 1133 Broadway between 25th & 26th Sts. When: Thursday, October 28, free with advance RSVP, 6:00 Why: When last we saw photographer David Godlis, he was taking part in a November 2020 Rizzoli Zoom discussion with writer Luc Sante, Blondie cofounder and guitarist Chris Stein, and Reel Art Press music editor Dave Brolan, talking about Godlis Streets (Reel Art Press, $39.95), which features Godlis’s New York City and Boston street photography from the 1970s and ’80s. Some of us have also caught him in Lewie and Noah Kloster’s brand-new seven-minute documentary Shots in the Dark with David Godlis, in which the longtime official photographer of the New York Film Festival goes back to his CBGB days.
On October 28, Godlis will be at Rizzoli in person, joined by the recently transitioned Lucy Sante (Low Life,Kill All Your Darlings), for the launch of his newest book, Godlis Miami (Real Art Press, $39.95), comprising photos Godlis shot down south, capturing a part of South Beach that no longer exists.
“I first went to Miami Beach when I was a kid in the 1950s,” he writes. “There are black and white snapshots of me sitting on the beach, wearing my Davy Crockett T-shirt, squinting under palm trees. My grandparents had retired there. For Jewish Eastern European immigrants, who had lived out their working life on the streets of New York City, retiring to sunshine, warm weather, beaches, and palm trees was a slice of heaven. For a kid visiting in the 1950s and early 1960s, it was like going to Jewish Disneyland. Goodbye, snow. Hello, coconuts. And so, when I returned to Miami Beach in 1974, with a camera, all these memories of Florida came flowing back to me. As I tripped the shutter over and over, taking pictures on those beaches I had walked upon as a little kid, everything clicked. Pun intended.”
Big Bird rides on a crescent moon on Met roof (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Who:Alex Da Corte, Shanay Jhaveri What: In-person discussion of Alex Da Corte’s Roof Garden Commission Where: The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, the Met Fifth Avenue When: Friday, October 29, free with museum admission and advance RSVP, 5:30 (installation on view through October 31) Why: In previous works, Camden-born, Philadelphia-based artist Alex Da Corte has embodied such famous real and fictional figures as Eminem, Mr. Rogers, and the Wicked Witch of the West. For his commission on the Met’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, As Long as the Sun Lasts, Da Corte took on the persona of Jim Henson in creating a work that melds childhood memories with visions of the endless sky, inspired by Alexander Calder’s mobiles and sculpture, Little Tikes plastic outdoor activity gyms, Donna Summer’s Four Seasons of Love album cover, the blue Garibaldo character from the Brazilian version of Sesame Street that he watched as a kid in Venezuela, the song from the 1985 movie Follow That Bird in which Big Bird gets painted blue, and the Italo Calvino titular short story.
Alex Da Corte’s As Long as the Sun Lasts continues through Halloween (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
The result is a playful and colorful kinetic sculpture that moves with the wind as Big Bird, covered in more than seven thousand handmade feathers, rides around on a crescent moon, holding on to a ladder of hope. Referring to his transformation into Henson, Da Corte says in a Met interview with curator Shanay Jhaveri, “It stems from thinking about characters I loved or didn’t understand and wanted to understand more. And I see Jim as quite a thoughtful maker.” For those who want to understand more about the installation, which is on view through October 31, Da Corte — likely in costume as Henson — and Jhaveri will sit down for another talk, in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium at the Met on October 29 at 5:30.
River L. Ramirez will discuss their latest project, GhostFolk, in a live BAC Zoom talk
Who:River L. Ramirez, Lou Tides, Sarah Galdes, Morgan Bassichis What: Streaming performance and live virtual discussion Where:Baryshnikov Arts Center online When: Live Zoom discussion October 26, free with RSVP, 7:00; performance available on demand through November 1 at 5:00, free Why: “This is a piece about life and living and celebrating the innate ability that we all have here on Earth to love, even if there’s nothing to love sometimes, even if it’s just for you, even if it’s, you know, a feeling that’s kind of cavernous and feels so lonely,” River L. Ramirez says in their introduction to the virtual piece GhostFolk, streaming for free from the Baryshnikov Arts Center through November 1. In the forty-minute work, the Queens-based musician and comedian plays guitar and tells stories in a contemporary song cycle that explores everyday life, joined by Teeny Lieberson/Lou Tides on bass and background vocals and Sarah Galdes on drums, looking like a hip Halloween trio, with costumes by Peter Smith, makeup by Angelo Balassone, and spooky lighting by Devin Cameron. “A new day begins,” Ramirez declares in the first tune.
Hello! A video I made for baryshnikov Art Center is out now. It’s haha, it’s lalalaaa, and other stuff. Go see it! It’s up u til November 1st. :,)
Over the course of forty minutes, they explore quarantine, read personal poems, find the face of Jesus in a plantain, call for babies to help us out of the mess we’re in, search for what’s next, explain that trolls are real, scream and screech, and listen to an animated frog as, occasionally, a figure in a sheet with holes dances in solitude. GhostFolk was filmed and edited by Tatyana Tenenbaum at BAC’s Jerome Robbins Theater; Tenenbaum, a star of the pandemic lockdown, has also shot such BAC works as Landrover and Holland Andrews’s Museum of Calm. On October 26 at 7:00, Ramirez, whose social media name is Pile of Tears and who used to do standup as Lorelei Ramirez, will discuss GhostFolk and more with comedian Morgan Bassichis in a live Zoom Q&A.
