Tag Archives: agnes varda

NYFF55: NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL 2017

Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying opens the fifty-fifth New York Film Festival this week

Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, Bruno Walter Auditorium, Alice Tully Hall
West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
September 28 – October 14
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org/nyff2017

The New York Film Festival turns fifty-five this year, with another powerful lineup of shorts, features, documentaries, animation, and more from around the world, with Richard Linklater’s road movie, Last Flag Flying, kicking it all off on September 28. The centerpiece selection is Todd Haynes’s Wonderstruck, based on a YA novel by Brian Selznick, with Woody Allen’s Coney Island-set Wonder Wheel closing things out on October 14. Divided into Main Slate, Convergence, Projections, Talks, Retrospectives, Revivals, Shorts, and Spotlight on Documentary, this year’s lineup also features works by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Arnaud Desplechin, Agnès Varda and JR, Greta Gerwig, Claire Denis, Noah Baumbach, Aki Kaurismäki, Agnieszka Holland, Claude Lanzmann, Rebecca Miller, Griffin Dunne, Abel Ferrara, and Hong Sang-soo, most of whom will be on hand for Q&As following select screenings. There’s also a twenty-four-film salute to Robert Mitchum celebrating the centennial of his birth; revivals of works by Jean Vigo, Jean-Luc Godard, Hou Hsiao-hsien, James Whale, Philippe Garrel, Jean Renoir, Jean-Pierre Melville, and others; experimental films by Xu Bing, Luke Fowler, Kevin Jerome Everson, Barbara Hammer, and more; immersive and interactive experiences; and panel discussions and dialogues. Below is a list of at least one highlight per day for which tickets are still available or the event is free; keep checking twi-ny for reviews and further information.

Thursday, September 28
Last Flag Flying (Richard Linklater, 2017), introduced by Richard Linklater, Bryan Cranston, Laurence Fishburne, J. Quinton Johnson, and Darryl Ponicsan, Alice Tully Hall, $100, 6:00

Friday, September 29
Convergence, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, free, 3:00 – 6:00 (also 9/30 and 10/1, 12 noon – 6:00)

Saturday, September 30
On Cinema: With Richard Linklater, moderated by Kent Jones, Walter Reade Theater, $25, 6:00

Spoor (Agnieszka Holland, in cooperation with Kasia Adamik, 2017), followed by a Q&A with Agnieszka Holland and Kasia Adamik, Alice Tully Hall, $25, 9:00

Sunday, October 1
HBO Directors Dialogues: Lucrecia Martel, Howard Gilman Theater, free, 3:00

Film Comment Live: The Cinema of Experience, amphitheater, free, 7:00

Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel closes the fifty-fifth New York Film Festival

Monday, October 2
HBO Directors Dialogues: Agnès Varda & JR, Francesca Beale Theater, free, 6:00

Zama (Lucrecia Martel, 2017), followed by a Q&A with Lucrecia Martel, Alice Tully Hall, $25, 6:00

Tuesday, October 3
L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934), Howard Gilman Theater, $15, 3:45

Wednesday, October 4
Film Comment Presents: A Gentle Creature (Sergei Loznitsa, 2017), Walter Reade Theater, $25, 6:00

Thursday, October 5
A Story from Chikamatsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954), Francesca Beale Theater, $15, 3:30

Friday, October 6
Spielberg (Susan Lacy, 2017), introduced by Jessica Levin and Emma Pildes, Walter Reade Theater, $25, 8:45

Saturday, October 7
Claude Lanzmann’s Four Sisters: The Hippocratic Oath (Claude Lanzmann, 2017), introduced by Claude Lanzmann, Alice Tully Hall, $25, 1:00

Good Luck (Ben Russell, 2017), followed by a Q&A with Ben Russell, Francesca Beale Theater, $15, 6:15

Sunday, October 8
Projections Program 5: Urban Rhapsodies, followed by a Q&A with Ayo Akingbade, Fern Silva, Ephraim Asili, and Michael Robinson, Francesca Beale Theater, $15, 12 noon

Let the Sun Shine In (Claire Denis, 2017), followed by a Q&A with Claire Denis, Alice Tully Hall, $25, 3:30

Monday, October 9
HBO Directors Dialogues: Hong Sang-soo, amphitheater, free, 7:00

Tuesday, October 10
HBO Directors Dialogues: Philippe Garrel, amphitheater, free, 8:00

Wednesday, October 11
Master Class: Vittorio Storaro and Ed Lachman, moderated by Kent Jones, Walter Reade Theater, $25, 6:15

Thursday, October 12
Hallelujah the Hills (Adolfas Mekas, 1963), introduced by Jonas Mekas, Howard Gilman Theater, $15, 6:00

Lucía (Humberto Solás 1968), Howard Gilman Theater, $15, 8:00

Friday, October 13
Ismael’s Ghosts (Arnaud Desplechin, 2017), Director’s Cut, followed by a Q&A with Arnaud Desplechin, Alice Tully Hall, $25, 6:00

Saturday, October 14
Farewell, My Lovely (Dick Richards, 1975), introduced by Robert Mitchum’s daughter, Petrine Mitchum, Howard Gilman Theater, $15, 1:30

PERFORMANCES AND ACTIVATIONS FOR “CALDER: HYPERMOBILITY”

Christian Marclay will perform Alexander Calder’s “Small Sphere and Heavy Sphere” July 19-23 at the Whitney (photograph © Jerry L. Thompson. Calder Foundation, New York; Mary Calder Rower Bequest, 2011. © 2017 Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)

Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort St.
Wednesday – Monday through October 23, $17-$22
212-570-3600
whitney.org

Alexander Calder, kineticism, and the Whitney have been inextricably linked since the institution acquired in May 1982 the Pennsylvania-born artist’s delightful “Calder’s Circus,” which, when on view, is always accompanied by a video showing the work in action. In addition, on rare occasions, it is activated live. The Whitney will be activating many of Calder’s other works in the new exhibition “Calder: Hypermobility,” set in motion at specific times to a specially commissioned sound walk by Jim O’Rourke. Activations, by motor or air, will take place multiple times each day (Monday to Thursday at 12 noon, 2:00, and 4:00; Friday at 12 noon, 2:00, 4:00, 7:30, 8:00, and 9:00; and Saturday and Sunday on the hour from 11:00 am to 4:00 pm). In addition, the Calder Foundation will activate the rarely exhibited “Object with Red Ball” on June 21 at 2:00, “Boomerangs” on June 28 at 2:00, “Tightrope” on July 9 at 4:00, “Goldfish Bowl” on July 12 at 2:00, and two untitled pieces on July 18 and 26 at 2:00, with more to come in August, September, and October. Below is a list of special performances by other artists during the run of the show, some of which require advance tickets.

Wednesday, July 19
through
Sunday, July 23
Christian Marclay performs Calder’s “Small Sphere and Heavy Sphere” (Calder’s first suspended mobile), with cellist Okkyung Lee, Susan and John Hess Family Theater

Saturday, August 5
and
Sunday, August 6
Jack Quartet, music by Earle Brown, John Cage, Morton Feldman, and others, Hurst Family Galleries

Thursday, September 7
through
Sunday, September 10
Arto Lindsay, noisemakers and rattles, in conjunction with the exhibition “Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium,” Susan and John Hess Family Theater

Thursday, September 28
Jill Magid, Susan and John Hess Family Theater

Friday, September 29
through
Sunday, October 1
Math Bass and Lauren Davis Fisher perform “Quiet Work in Session,” Susan and John Hess Family Theater

Thursday, October 5
and
Friday, October 6
C. Spencer Yeh, Susan and John Hess Family Theater

Saturday, October 7
A screening of films commissioned by the Calder Foundation by artists Ephraim Asili, Rosa Barba, Lucy Raven, Agnès Varda, and others, followed by a conversation moderated by Victoria Brooks, Susan and John Hess Family Theater

Friday, October 13
through
Sunday, October 15
Empire State Works in Progress, with artist Abigail DeVille and director Charlotte Brathwaite, Susan and John Hess Family Theater

Friday, October 20
through
Sunday, October 22
Nora Schultz, Susan and John Hess Family Theater

AGNÈS VARDA — LIFE AS ART: DAGUERRÉOTYPES

Agnès Varda will be at FIAF on March 7 to talk about her 1975 documentary, DAGUERRÉOTYPES

CinéSalon: DAGUERRÉOTYPES (Agnès Varda, 1975)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, March 7, $14, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesday nights through March 21
212-355-6100
fiaf.org

On February 28, legendary auteur Agnès Varda was at FIAF for the special talk “Agnès Varda: Visual Artist.” The Belgium-born, France-based Varda, who is eighty-eight, will be back at FIAF on March 7 for the 7:30 screening of her 1975 documentary, Daguerréotypes, after which she will participate in a Q&A with former MoMA curator Laurence Kardish. (The film will also be shown at 4:00; both screenings will be followed by a wine and beer reception.) The eighty-minute work, which only received its official U.S. theatrical release in 2011 at the Maysles Cinema, is an absolutely charming look at Varda’s longtime Parisian community. In the film, Varda, who has made such New Wave classics as Cléo de 5 à 7 and Le Bonheur as well as such seminal personal documentaries as The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnès, turns her camera on the people she and husband Jacques Demy lived with along the Rue Daguerre in Paris’s 14th arrondissement. Varda, who also narrates the film, primarily stands in the background while capturing local shopkeepers talking about their businesses and how they met their spouses as customers stop by, picking up bread, meat, perfume, and other items. Varda uses a goofy, low-rent magic show as a centerpiece, with many of the characters attending this major cultural event; the magician references the magic of both life and cinema itself, with Varda titling the film not only after the street where she lives but also directly evoking the revolutionary photographic process developed by Louis Daguerre in the 1820s and ’30s. Daguerréotypes has quite a different impact now than it did back in the mid-1970s, depicting a time that already felt like the past but now feels like a long-forgotten era, when neighbors knew one another and lived as a tight-knit community. The FIAF CinéSalon series “Agnès Varda: Life as Art” continues with Jacqot de Nantes on March 14 and Lola on March 21. Varda fans will also want to check our her gallery show at Blum & Poe, which runs through April 15.

TICKET ALERT — AGNÈS VARDA: VISUAL ARTIST

French legend Agnès Varda will discuss her life and career as a visual artist at FIAF

French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, February 28, $30, 7:30
Series continues Tuesday nights through March 21
212-355-6100
fiaf.org

Over the years, FIAF has shown many films by Nouvelle Vague master Agnès Varda, the celebrated auteur behind such classics as Vagabond, Cléo from 5 to 7, The Gleaners and I, Jacquot de Nantes, and The Beaches of Agnès. Now the French Institute Alliance Française is bringing Varda herself to Florence Gould Hall for the special talk “Agnès Varda: Visual Artist,” taking place on February 28 at 7:30, moderated by art dealer Olivier Renaud-Clément. The Belgium-born, France-based Varda, who was married to Jacques Demy for nearly thirty years, will be focusing not only on her film career but her upcoming gallery show at Blum & Poe, which runs March 2 to April 15. The discussion also kicks off FIAF’s CinéSalon series “Agnès Varda: Life as Art,” which consists of Varda’s Daguerréotypes on March 7, with the 7:30 screening followed by a talk with Varda and curator Laurence Kardish, Jacqot de Nantes on March 14, and Lola on March 21. This is a very special chance to see the remarkable eighty-eight-year-old Varda, so get your tickets now.

LABOR OF LOVE — 100 YEARS OF MOVIE DATES: MASCULIN FÉMININ

Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud) has his eyes on the prize in Godard’s MASCULIN FÉMININ

MASCULIN FÉMININ (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Friday, May 6, 2:00 & 7:00
Series runs May 4-17
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

In a 1966 interview with Pierre Daix about Masculin feminin, director Jean-Luc Godard said, “When I made this film, I didn’t have the least idea of what I wanted.” Initially to be based on the Guy de Maupassant short stories “The Signal” and “Paul’s Mistress,” the film ended up being a revolutionary examination of the emerging youth culture in France, which Godard identifies as “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” Godard threw away the script and worked on the fly to make the film, which stars Jean-Pierre Léaud as Paul, a peculiar young man who quickly becomes obsessed with budding pop star Madeleine, played by real-life Yé-yé singer Chantal Goya. (Godard discovered her on a television variety show.) Paul chases Madeleine, getting a job at the same company, going to the movies and nightclubs with her and her friends, and meeting her in cafés, where he wants to talk about the troubles of contemporary society and she just wants to have a good time. “Man’s conscience doesn’t determine his existence. His social being determines his conscience,” Paul proclaims. He continually argues that there is nothing going on even as strange events occur around him to which he is completely oblivious, including a lover’s spat in which a woman guns down a man in broad daylight. (Sounds of rapid-fire bullets can be heard over the intertitles for each of the film’s fifteen faits précis, evoking a sense of impending doom.) Paul has bizarre conversations with his best friend, Robert (Michel Debord), a radical who asks him to help put up anarchist posters. Posing as a journalist, Paul brutally interviews Miss 19 (Elsa Leroy), a young model with a very different view of society and politics. Godard has also included a playful battle of the sexes in the center of it all: Paul wants Madeleine, much to the consternation of Madeleine’s roommate, Elisabeth (Marlène Jobert), who also has designs on her; meanwhile, Robert goes out with another of Madeleine’s friends, the more grounded Catherine (Catherine-Isabelle Duport), who is interested in Paul. It all makes for great fun, taking place in a surreal black-and-white world dominated by rampant consumerism.

Brigitte Bardot makes an unexpected cameo in MASCULIN FÉMININ

In addition, Godard comments on the state of cinema itself. As they watch a Bergman-esque Swedish erotic film (directed by Godard and starring Eva-Britt Strandberg and Birger Malmsten), Paul dashes off to the projectionist, arguing that the aspect ratio is wrong. And in a café scene, French starlet Brigitte Bardot and theater director Antoine Bourseiller sit in a booth, playing themselves as they go over a script, bringing together the real and the imaginary. “I no longer have any idea where I am from the point of view of cinema,” Godard told Daix. “I am in search of cinema. It seems to me that I have lost it.” Well, he apparently found it again with the seminal Masculin feminin, which is screening with Agnès Varda’s 1975 eight-minute short, Women Reply: Our Bodies Our Sex, on May 6 in the BAMcinématek series “Labor of Love: 100 First Dates.” The festival, inspired by Moira Weigel’s new book, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, consists of great date flicks that are also about searching for a significant other. The lineup also features such favorites as Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail paired with Edwin S. Porter’s 1904 How a French Nobleman Got a Wife through the New York Herald, Richard Brooks’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar, William Friedkin’s Cruising, Max Ophüls’s La Ronde, and Mary Harron’s American Psycho. Be careful which film you choose to see if you’ll be taking a date, as it will reveal a whole lot about you….

CREATIVE ENCOUNTERS: THE BEACHES OF AGNÈS

Agnès Varda takes an unusual approach to autobiography in THE BEACHES OF AGNES

CinéSalon: THE BEACHES OF AGNÈS (LES PLAGES D’AGNÈS) (Agnès Varda, 2008)
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, May 3, $14, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesdays through May 31
212-355-6100
www.fiaf.org

“The whole idea of fragmentation appeals to me,” filmmaker, photographer, and installation artist Agnès Varda says in the middle of her unusual cinematic autobiography, the César-winning documentary The Beaches of Agnès. “It corresponds so naturally to questions of memory. Is it possible to reconstitute this personality, this person Jean Vilar, who was so exceptional?” She might have been referring to her friend, the French actor and theater director, but the exceptional Belgian-French Varda might as well have been referring to herself. Later she explains, “My memories swarm around me like confused flies. I hesitate to remember all that. I don’t want to.” Fortunately for viewers, Varda (Jacquot de Nantes, The Gleaners and I) does delve into her past in the film, sharing choice tidbits from throughout her life and career, in creative and offbeat ways that are charmingly self-effacing. Using cleverly arranged film clips, re-creations, photographs, and an array of frames and mirrors, the eighty-year-old Varda discusses such colleagues as Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, and Alain Resnais; shares personal details of her long relationship with Jacques Demy; visits her childhood home; rebuilds an old film set; speaks with her daughter, Rosalie Varda, and son, Mathieu Demy; talks about several of her classic films, including La Pointe Courte, Cléo from 5 to 7, and Vagabond; and, in her ever-present bangs, walks barefoot along beaches, fully aware that the camera is following her every move and reveling in it while also feigning occasional shyness. Filmmakers don’t generally write and direct documentaries about themselves, but unsurprisingly, the Nouvelle Vague legend and first woman to win an honorary Palme d’or makes The Beaches of Agnès about as artistic as it can get without becoming pretentious and laudatory. The film is screening May 3 at 4:00 and 7:30, kicking off FIAF’s “Creative Encounters” CinéSalon series, comprising five unique documentary portraits. (By the way, the FIAF award Varda won in 2013 was from the International Federation of Film Archives for her work in film presentation and restoration, not from the French Institute Alliance Française.) The festival continues every Tuesday in May with Guillaume Nicloux’s The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq, Michel Gondry’s Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, Claire Denis’s Jacques Rivette, the Night Watchman, and Chantal Akerman’s One Day Pina Asked…

QUEER/ART/FILM: HUSH . . . HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE

Bette Davis is a scream in cult classic HUSH . . . HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE

HUSH . . . HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE (Robert Aldrich, 1964)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at Third St.
Monday, September 21, 8:00
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

Hot on the heels of their success with What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, director Robert Aldrich and star Bette Davis sought to make a kind of thematic sequel again with Joan Crawford, another campy psychological thriller about jealousy, family, and the wounds of time. Crawford pulled out of the production, but she was replaced by one of Davis’s good friends, Olivia de Havilland, which added a terrific edge to what became another hit, Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte. The film is screening September 21 at 8:00 as part of the monthly IFC Center series “Queer/Art/Film,” curated by Adam Baran and Ira Sachs, consisting of influential works selected by gay artists. Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte was chosen by self-described “actor, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, director, and drag legend” Charles Busch (The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife, Die Mommie Die!), who will be on hand for a postfilm discussion. “I had my father take me to the opening day,” Busch says on the IFC Center website. “The stars were there, promoting the film. I was transfixed, studying how a legendary actress behaves.” The film is set on a Louisiana plantation where Charlotte Hollis (Davis) lives as a recluse with her devoted housekeeper, the batty Velma Cruther (Agnes Moorehead). It is 1964, thirty-seven years after Charlotte’s lover, the married John Mayhew (Bruce Dern), was brutally behanded and beheaded at a party thrown by Charlotte’s father, the controlling Big Sam (Victor Buono, who also appeared in Baby Jane). The Hollis mansion must be torn down to make way for a bridge, but Charlotte refuses to leave, causing major headaches for the sheriff (Wesley Addy) and the construction foreman (George Kennedy). Charlotte’s poor cousin, Miriam Deering (de Havilland), arrives to help the deeply tortured Charlotte, but Miriam and family doctor Drew Bayliss (Joseph Cotten) seem to have other plans. Meanwhile, kindly old reporter Harry Willis (Cecil Kellaway) starts poking around, trying to get to the truth behind all the mystery and madness.

Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte is a grisly southern gothic centered on the relationship between the crazed Charlotte and the calm, collected Miriam, allowing Davis and de Havilland to play off each other beautifully, the former chewing up huge swaths of scenery, the latter cleaning it all up neatly with a spritz of cold menace. The supporting cast, which features numerous Twilight Zone veterans and a cameo by Mary Astor in her final role, provides able support as Aldrich (The Dirty Dozen, Kiss Me Deadly) wishes a fond farewell to the Old South in striking black-and-white, courtesy of cinematographer Joseph F. Biroc, who also worked with Aldrich on such diverse films as The Flight of the Phoenix, The Killing of Sister George, and The Longest Yard. Composer Frank De Vol is responsible for the chilling soundtrack. It’s all great fun, with legitimate scares, helping it earn seven Oscar nominations, including for Moorehead, Biroc, and De Vol (as well as for art direction, costume design, editing, and song). It should be quite a blast getting Busch’s take on this cult classic. “Queer/Art/Film” continues October 9 with Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (with K8 Hardy) and November 23 with Alan Parker’s Fame (with Kia LaBeija).