Tag Archives: andrei tarkovsky

THE MODERN SCHOOL OF FILM: THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS

Takashi Miike riffs on multiple genres in the endlessly delightful HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS

THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS (Takashi Miike, 2001)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Tuesday, May 7, 8:15
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

Japanese genre king Takashi Miike, who has made more than one hundred films in his twenty-two-year career, outdoes himself in The Happiness of the Katakuris, an endlessly inventive tale of the Katakuris, a family that moves to the middle of nowhere to run a country inn. The only problem is that when guests finally arrive, they all end up dead — in bizarre, ridiculous ways — and the father decides to bury them instead of reporting the incidents, in order to protect the inn and the family’s future. Miike (Ichi The Killer, Audition, Thirteen Assassins) masterfully mixes comedy, romance, Claymation, music, murder, and mayhem in this enormously entertaining and highly original movie that is filled with a never-ending bag of surprises. The Happiness of the Katakuris is screening in a 35mm print May 7 at 8:15 as part of the IFC Center series “The Modern School of Film” and will be followed by a discussion with Brooklyn-based choreographer Mark Morris; the series continues May 9 with John M. Stahl’s 1945 melodrama Leave Her to Heaven, with Neil LaBute on hand to talk about it, May 13 with Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror and Bill T. Jones, and May 28 with Vittorio De Sica’s Miracle in Milan and Laurie Anderson.

THREE AUTEURS OF WORLD CINEMA — ANDREI TARKOVSKY: STALKER

Andrei Tarkovsky’s STALKER takes place in the fantastical land known as the Zone

STALKER (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
Mid-Manhattan Library
455 Fifth Ave. at 40th St.
Wednesday, March 20, free, 7:00
www.nypl.org

Set in a seemingly postapocalyptic world that is never explained, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is an existential work of immense beauty, a deeply philosophical, continually frustrating, and endlessly rewarding journey into nothing less than the heart and soul of the world. Alexander Kaidanovsky stars as Stalker, a careful, precise man who has been hired to lead Writer and Professor (Tarkovsky regulars Anatoli Solonitsyn and Nikolai Grinko, respectively) into the forbidden Zone, a place of mystery that houses a room where it is said that people can achieve their most inner desires. While Stalker’s home and the bar where the men meet are dark, gray, and foreboding, the Zone is filled with lush green fields, trees, and aromatic flowers — as well as abandoned vehicles, strange passageways, and inexplicable sounds. The Zone — which heavily influenced J. J. Abrams’s creation of the island on Lost — has a life all its own as past, present, and future merge in an expansive land where every forward movement is fraught with danger but there is no turning back. An obsessive tyrant of a filmmaker, Tarkovsky (Andrei Rublev, Solaris) imbues every shot with a supreme majesty, taking viewers on an unusual and unforgettable cinematic adventure. Stalker is screening for free March 20 at the Mid-Manhattan Library as part of the series “Three Auteurs of World Cinema,” which began with six films by Wong Kar-wai and continues with Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice on March 27 before presenting eight works by Federico Fellini beginning April 10 with I Vitteloni.

THREE AUTEURS OF WORLD CINEMA — ANDREI TARKOVSKY: THE MIRROR

Andrei Tarkovsky’s surreal THE MIRROR will be screening for free at Mid-Manhattan Library

THE MIRROR (ZERKALO) (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)
Mid-Manhattan Library
455 Fifth Ave. at 40th St.
Wednesday, March 13, free, 7:00
www.nypl.org
www.kino.com

”Words can’t really express a person’s emotions. They’re too inert.” So says Andrei Tarkovsky in his dream-filled, surreal classic The Mirror, which features long scenes with little or no dialogue. Tarkovsky turns the mirror on himself and his childhood to tell the fragmented and disjointed story of WWII-era Russia through his own personal experiences with his family. Tarkovsky was obsessed with film as art, and this nonlinear film, which shifts back and forth between color and black-and-white, is his poetic masterpiece; he even includes his father’s (Arseny Tarkovsky) poems read over shots that are crafted as if paintings. Many of the actors (which include his mother, Maria Vishnyakova, and his wife, Larisa Tarkovskaya, in addition to Margarita Terekhova, Ignat Daniltsev, and Anatoli Solonitsyn) play several roles; have fun trying to figure out who is who and what exactly is going on at any one moment. The Mirror is screening for free March 13 at the Mid-Manhattan Library as part of the series “Three Auteurs of World Cinema,” which began with six films by Wong Kar-wai and continues with Tarkovsky’s Stalker and The Sacrifice before presenting eight works by Federico Fellini beginning April 10 with I Vitteloni.

GEOFF DYER ON TARKOVSKY, CINEMA, AND LIFE: THE MIRROR

Geoff Dyer will discuss his obsession with Andrei Tarkovsky in a special program at the Museum of the Moving Image that includes a screening of the Russian master’s MIRROR

SEE IT BIG! THE MIRROR (ZERKALO) (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Sunday, March 11, free with museum admission, 3:00 & 6:00
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us
www.geoffdyer.com

“Words can’t really express a person’s emotions. They’re too inert.” So says Andrei Tarkovsky’s dream-filled, surreal masterpiece The Mirror, which features long scenes with little or no dialogue. Tarkovsky turns the mirror on himself and his childhood to tell the fragmented and disjointed story of WWII-era Russia through his own personal experiences with his family. Tarkovsky was obsessed with film as art, and this nonlinear film is his poetic masterpiece; he even includes his father’s poems read over shots that are crafted as if paintings. Many of the actors play several roles; have fun trying to figure out who is who and what exactly is going on at any one moment. The Mirror is screening on March 11 at 6:00 at the Museum of the Moving Image as part of the special program “Geoff Dyer on Tarkovsky, Cinema, and Life” and the ongoing “See It Big!” series and will be introduced by award-winning author Dyer, whose latest nonfiction tome is Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room (Pantheon, February 21, $24), an obsessively detailed examination of Tarkovsky’s Stalker in which he makes it very clear that the Russian filmmaker’s work must be seen on the big screen. At 3:00, Dyer will participate in a conversation with the museum’s chief curator, David Schwartz. For more on Dyer and his other local appearances, check out our twi-ny talk with him, which you can find here.

TARKOVSKY INTERRUPTUS: STALKER

STALKER (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979)
The New School, Tishman Auditorium
6 West 12th St. at Fifth Ave.
Saturday, March 10, free, 5:00
212-998-2101
www.nyihumanities.org
www.amt.parsons.edu

Set in a seemingly postapocalyptic world that is never explained, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is an existential work of immense beauty, a deeply philosophical, continually frustrating, and endlessly rewarding journey into nothing less than the heart and soul of the world. Alexander Kaidanovsky stars as Stalker, a careful, precise man who has been hired to lead Writer and Professor (Tarkovsky regulars Anatoli Solonitsyn and Nikolai Grinko, respectively) into the forbidden Zone, a place of mystery that houses a room where it is said that people can achieve their most inner desires. While Stalker’s home and the bar where the men meet are dark, gray, and foreboding, the Zone is filled with lush green fields, trees, and aromatic flowers — as well as abandoned vehicles, strange passageways, and inexplicable sounds. The Zone — which heavily influenced J. J. Abrams’s creation of the island on Lost — has a life all its own as past, present, and future merge in an expansive land where every forward movement is fraught with danger but there is no turning back. An obsessive tyrant of a filmmaker, Tarkovsky (Andrei Rublev, Solaris) imbues every shot with a supreme majesty, taking viewers on an unusual and unforgettable cinematic adventure. On March 10 at 5:00, the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU and the Illustration Program at Parsons are teaming up to present “Tarkovsy Interruptus,” a free screening of the film that will be stopped at several points for commentary from what is being referred to as a “a distinguished panel of Tarkovsky fanatics,” including Geoff Dyer, Walter Murch, Phillip Lopate, Francine Prose, Michael Benson, and Dana Stevens. The program is being held in conjunction with the publication of Dyer’s latest work, Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room (Pantheon, February 21, $24). For more on Dyer, who will also introduce the screening, you can read our twi-ny talk with him here.

TWI-NY TALK: GEOFF DYER

ZONA: A BOOK ABOUT A FILM ABOUT A JOURNEY TO A ROOM
Friday, March 9, 192 Books, 192 Tenth Ave., free, 7:00
Saturday, March 10, “Tarkovsky Interruptus,” the New School, Tishman Auditorium, 6 West 12th St., free, 5:00
Sunday, March 11, “Geoff Dyer on Tarkovsky, Cinema, and Life,” Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35th Ave., free with museum admission, 3:00 & 6:00
Monday, March 12, School of Visual Arts, Beatrice Theater, 333 West 23rd St., free, 7:00

“This book is an account of watching, rememberings, misrememberings, and forgettings; it is not the record of a dissection,” British author Geoff Dyer writes in Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room (Pantheon, February 21, $24). Over the course of some two hundred pages, Dyer immerses the viewer in the fantastical world of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film, Stalker, in which the title character leads two men, Writer and Professor, on a dangerous trip into the Zone, a mysterious area that harbors a room where people’s most inner desires are said to come true. Dyer’s obsessively thorough scene-by-scene examination of the film includes tidbits about the making of the existential work as well as stories about his own personal life while referencing Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard, Roland Barthes and Timothy Leary, Werner Herzog and Richard Widmark, Leo Tolstoy and T. S. Eliot, Mick Jagger and Jim Jarmusch, Milan Kundera and Don DeLillo, John Berger and Alan Watts, and Robert Bresson and Ingmar Bergman, sometimes extending footnotes across several pages that dwarf the main text. Zona is a wonderful companion piece to the film, a must-read for fans of Tarkovsky and the study of cinema itself.

On March 9, Dyer will be reading from and signing copies of Zona at 192 Books in Chelsea, then will participate in the “Tarkovsky Interruptus” program being held at the New School on March 10, a screening of Stalker that will occasionally be interrupted by commentary from Dyer, Walter Murch, Phillip Lopate, Francine Prose, Michael Benson, and Dana Stevens. Dyer will continue his whirlwind adventure on March 11 at the Museum of the Moving Image when he hosts “Geoff Dyer on Tarkovsky, Cinema, and Life,” a discussion with David Schwartz at 3:00, followed by a screening of Tarkovsky’s Mirror at 6:00. And on March 12 he’ll be at the School of Visual Arts for a lecture and book signing.

Geoff Dyer will share his Tarkovsky obsession with special appearances all over the city (photo by Marzena Pogorzaly)

twi-ny: In Zona, you essentially play the part of Writer, Professor, and Stalker as you guide readers through the film and certain parts of your life. Which of the three characters do you most closely identify with?

Geoff Dyer: Well, ostensibly it would have to be Writer. He’s my embedded representative. I like his washed-up-ness, his sense of failure, his dissatisfaction with himself and the world. But ultimately it would be Stalker because he’s a believer.

twi-ny: You first saw Stalker in February 1981; how many times have you now seen it on the big screen?

Geoff Dyer: I’ve lost track. More than any film except Where Eagles Dare, which, now that I think of it, I’ve only seen on the big screen once. At this particular moment I’m not in a hurry to see it again but I’m sure I will do so again in the future. It is nothing if not inexhaustible — despite my attempts to exhaust it.

twi-ny: On March 11, you’ll be at the Museum of the Moving Image introducing Tarkovsky’s Mirror, which is mentioned often in Zona. What should a Tarkovsky virgin know about Mirror before experiencing it?

Geoff Dyer: I don’t think you need to know much about it; you just need to relax, to abandon preconceptions and expectations about how a film should proceed, and give yourself to it. It’s the same with Indian classical music; people worry that they don’t know enough to get into it when all you really need is a pair of ears. On reflection, maybe cannabis helps in both these cases. It might also be interesting to think about Terence Malick’s recent Tree of Life. He must have had Mirror in mind when he was making that.

twi-ny: In previous books, you’ve taken unique approaches in examining D. H. Lawrence, jazz, John Berger, and now Andrei Tarkovsky and Stalker. Do you see any similarities among these subjects that drove you to write about them in such detail?

Geoff Dyer: Not really, only my own fan-ness, my love for these things. I see a different continuity with some of the other books — Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, The Missing of the Somme, and the second part of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi — and that is more about an ongoing fascination with the idea of the Zone. The one in the film is a sort of invented place but I’ve been drawn to similar places in the real world — places of heightened meaning, of religious significance, places where time has stood its ground, where you have some kind of peak experience — in these books.

SEE IT BIG! THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY

Clint Eastwood is the Good in classic Sergio Leone operatic oater

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (Sergio Leone, 1966)
Museum of the Moving Image
35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria
Friday, February 10, $12, 7:00
Series runs through March 17
718-777-6800
www.movingimage.us

One of the all-time-great spaghetti Westerns, Sergio Leone’s dusty three-hour operatic oater stars Clint Eastwood as the Good (Blondie), Lee Van Cleef as the Bad (Angel Eyes), and Eli Wallach as the Ugly (Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez, whose list of criminal offenses is a riot), three unique individuals after $200,000 in Confederate gold buried in a cemetery in the middle of nowhere. Nearly 20 minutes of never-before-seen footage added to the film a few years ao, with Wallach and Eastwood overdubbing brand-new dialogue, so if you haven’t seen it in a while, it might just be time to catch it again, this time on the big screen as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s “See It Big!” series. Ennio Morricone’s unforgettable score and Torino delli Colli’s gorgeous widescreen cinematography were also marvelously enhanced; their work in the scene when Tuco first comes upon the graveyard will make you dizzy with delight. And then comes one of the greatest finales in cinema history. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is screening at the museum on February 10 at 7:00, with the series continuing with such classics as Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns on February 19 (introduced by Dan Callahan), The Sound of Music on March 3, North by Northwest on March 9-10, Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Mirror on March 11 (introduced by Geoff Dyer), and Touch of Evil on March 16-17.