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BAM AND TRIPLE CANOPY — ON RESENTMENT: HUNGER

Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) and Father Dominic Moran (Liam Cunningham) are caught amid the Troubles in Steve McQueen’s Hunger

HUNGER (Steve McQueen, 2008)
BAMfilm, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Monday, March 25, 4:00 & 9:30
Series runs March 20-28
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.ifcfilms.com

In 2004, we saw Steve McQueen’s fascinating video installation of three short works at Wellesley’s Davis Museum. As entertaining and intriguing as that show was, it never could have prepared us for Hunger, the British-born Turner Prize winner’s brutal and harrowing feature-length debut, let alone his follow-up, 12 Years a Slave. Winner of the Camera d’Or at Cannes, Hunger is set amid the Troubles in Northern Island, as IRA members are locked up in the Maze prison. Seeking special category status, the prisoners are on a Blanket and No Wash protest, refusing to wear official garb or clean up after themselves. They wipe their feces all over their cell walls and let their maggot-infested garbage pile up in corners. Meanwhile, the guards, who live in their own kind of daily fear, never miss a chance to beat the prisoners mercilessly. McQueen (Shame, Widows) introduces the audience to the infamous prison through the eyes of one of the high-ranking guards, Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham), and new prisoner Davey Gillen (Brian Milligan). Cinematographer Sean Bobbitt often lets his camera linger on a scene, with little or no dialogue, composing them as if individual works of art; one particularly gorgeous shot features Lohan having a cigarette outside the prison as snow falls. About halfway through, the film radically changes focus as Father Dominic Moran (Liam Cunningham) visits H Block leader Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender), leading to sixteen minutes of uninterrupted dialogue, the camera never moving, as the two men discuss Sands’s planned hunger strike. Written with Enda Walsh (Disco Pigs, The Walworth Farce), McQueen’s film is a visually stunning, emotionally powerful story that will leave you ragged.

Prison guard Raymond Lohan (Stuart Graham) stops for a smoke in powerful Hunger

Hunger is screening March 25 in the BAM / Triple Canopy series “On Resentment,” which asks such questions as “How can resentment be reclaimed by those who are used to fits of anger and bitterness being called unproductive, petty, selfish, even pathological?” and “Can — and must — resentment be useful?” The series continues through March 28 with such other films as Liang Zhao’s Petition, Lucretia Martel’s Zama, Lino Brocka’s Manila in the Claws of Light, Brett Story’s The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, and Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña’s Who Killed Vincent Chin?

BAM AND TRIPLE CANOPY — ON RESENTMENT: LA HAINE

Hubert (Hubert Koundé), Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui), and Vinz (Vincent Cassel) experience a wild and dangerous day in La haine

CURATOR’S CHOICE SCREENING: LA HAINE (HATE) (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Wednesday, March 20, 7:30
Series runs March 20-28
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.canopycanopycanopy.com

BAM and Triple Canopy, the New York–based online magazine, have teamed up to present the provocative film series “On Resentment,” which kicks off March 20 at 7:30 with Mathieu Kassovitz’s incendiary 1995 stunner, La haine, inspired by the real-life stories of Makome M’Bowole and Malik Oussekine, two young men who were killed by police in 1993 and 1986, respectively. Kassovitz’s second feature film (following Métisse), La haine, which means “hate,” is set in the immediate aftermath of Paris riots as three friends —the Jewish Vinz (Vincent Cassel), the Afro-French Hubert (Hubert Koundé), and the Arab Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui) — spend about twenty hours wandering the mean streets of their banlieue (suburban projects) and Paris, causing minor mayhem as they encounter skinheads, stop off for some wine at an art opening, try to get into a hot club, and, over and over, become embroiled with the police.

The disaffected youths are fed up with a system that continues to treat them as outsiders, assuming they are criminals. Hubert wants to get out of the banlieue through hard work, but he keeps running into obstacles that are out of his control; at one point, when something goes wrong, he closes his eyes as if he can wish it away. Saïd is an immature schemer who thinks he can slide out of any untoward situation, especially with the help of his much more grounded older brother. But Vinz is a significant problem; one of their friends, Abdel (Abdel Ahmed Ghili), was arrested at the riots and has been severely injured while in police custody. Vinz has sworn to kill a policeman if Abdel dies, something that becomes more possible when he picks up a gun an officer dropped. “I’m fuckin’ sick of the goddam system!” Vinz proclaims, filled with resentment. The three young men pass by a few signs that say “The World Is Yours,” a reference to Scarface, but that seems far out of reach for them.

Vinz (Vincent Cassel) sees trouble coming in Mathieu Kassovitz’s explosive La haine

Photographed in gritty black-and-white by Pierre Aïm and edited with a caged fury by Kassovitz and Scott Stevenson, La haine is electrifying cinema, a powder keg of a film ready to explode at any second. The time is shown onscreen before each scene, going from 10:38 to 06:00, like a ticking time bomb. The film has a documentary-like quality, complete with actual news footage of riots and violence. Kassovitz shows up as a skinhead, while his father, director and writer Peter Kassovitz, is a patron at the art gallery. The soundtrack features songs by French hip-hoppers Assassin; Cassel’s brother, Mathias Crochon, is a member of the group. And look for French star Vincent Lindon’s riotous cameo as a very drunk man.

Several times Vinz appears to be looking straight into the camera, pointing his gun accusingly at the audience; his complete disdain for all types of authority is reckless and dangerous but also understandable, and Kassovitz is extending that rage beyond the screen. In fact, during the November 2005 riots in France, people looked to Kassovitz for a response, and the writer-actor-director eventually got into a blog battle with Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy, who would later become prime minister. Kassovitz wrote, “As much as I would like to distance myself from politics, it is difficult to remain distant in the face of the depravations of politicians. And when these depravations draw the hate of all youth, I have to restrain myself from encouraging the rioters.” Sarkozy replied, “You seem to be acquainted with the suburbs well enough to know, deep inside you, that the situation has been tense there for many years and that the unrest is deep-rooted. Your film La haine, shot in 1995, already showed this unease that right-wing and left-wing governments had to deal with, with varying results. To claim this crisis is down to the Minister of the Interior’s sayings and doings is yet another way of missing the point. I attributed this to an untimely and quick-tempered reaction.”

The BAM/Triple Canopy series is a nine-day program of films that focus on the concept of resentment as it applies to politics, identity, and representation, asking such questions as “How can resentment be reclaimed by those who are used to fits of anger and bitterness being called unproductive, petty, selfish, even pathological?” and “Can — and must — resentment be useful?” The Curator’s Choice screening of La haine will be followed by a discussion with artist and writer Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, series programmer Ashley Clark, and Triple Canopy editor Emily Wang, who cowrote the TC article “A Note on Resentment” with Shen Goodman, which states, “We’re proposing to hold on to resentment not so much as a means of plotting the downfall of our enemies — though why not, it is the resentment issue — but as a starting point for thinking and making and belonging. . . . Who, if anyone, has a right to be resentful? How can resentment be useful? (Must resentment be useful?)” And of course, the film is relevant yet again in light of the Yellow Vest protests held earlier this year in Paris and the many people of color shot by police or who die in custody under questionable, controversial circumstances here in America. The series continues through March 28 with such other films as Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, Lindsay Anderson’s If . . . , and John Akomfrah’s Handsworth Songs.

MAKING WAVES — NEW ROMANIAN CINEMA: AFERIM!

Father (Teodor Corban) and son (Mihai Comānoiu) hunt for a runaway slave in wickedly funny Aferim!

AFERIM! (Radu Jude, 2015)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Sunday, December 2, 6:30
Series runs November 26 – December 2
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
bigworldpictures.org

BAM’s weeklong “Making Waves: New Romanian Cinema” series began November 26 with Adina Pintilie’s Golden Bear winner Touch Me Not and concludes December 2 with Radu Jude’s Silver Bear winner Aferim! Romania’s 2015 submission for the Academy Awards is a savagely funny blacker-than-black comic Western about bigotry, infidelity, and frontier justice in 1835 Wallachia. Lawkeeper Costandin (Teodor Corban) and his son, Ionitā (Mihai Comānoiu), are galloping through the local countryside, searching for runaway Gypsy slave Carfin (Cuzin Toma), who Boyar Iordache Cindescu (Alexandru Dabija) has accused of having an affair with his wife, Sultana (Mihaela Sîrbu). The surly Costandin leads the hunt, verbally cutting down everyone he meets, from random old women to abbots to fellow lawmen, with wicked barbs, calling them filthy whores, crows, and other foul names while spouting ridiculous theories about honor and religion; he even batters his son, saying he’s “a waste of bread” and that “if you slap him, he’ll die of grief.” It’s a cruel, cholera-filled time in which even the monks beat the poor and where Costandin regales a priest with the telling riddle, “Lifeless out of life, life out of lifeless,” which the priest thinks refers to the coming doomsday.

Cowritten by Jude and novelist Florin Lăzărescu (Our Special Envoy, Numbness), who previously collaborated on the short film The Tube with a Hat, and shot in gloriously stark black-and-white by Marius Panduru (12:08 East of Bucharest; Police, Adjective), the Romanian / Bulgarian / Czech coproduction is an absurdist combination of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail, and John Ford’s The Searchers, skewering everything in its path, either overtly or under its wide-reaching breath. Even Dana Pāpāruz’s costumes are a genuine riot, especially the boyar’s majestically ridiculous hat. But Aferim! is more than just a clever parody of period films and nineteenth-century Eastern European culture and social mores; it is also a brilliant exploration of the nature of racism, discrimination, misogyny, and the aristocracy that directly relates to what’s going on around the world today as well as how Romania has dealt with its own sorry past of enslaving the Romani people. Jude was inspired by real events and historical documents, setting the film immediately after the 1834 Russian occupation, which adds to its razor-sharp observations.

“Aferim! is an attempt to gaze into the past, to take a journey inside the mentalities of the beginning of the nineteenth century — all epistemological imperfections inherent to such an enterprise included,” Jude says in his director’s statement. “It is obvious that such an effort would be pointless should we not believe that this hazy past holds the explanation for certain present issues.” Aferim! is screening December 2 at 6:30, followed by a Q&A with producer Ada Solomon. The series also includes such other recent Romanian films as Monica Lãzurean-Gorgan and Andrei Gorgan’s Free Dacians, Mona Nicoară and Dana Bunescu’s The Distance Between Me and Me, and Ivana Mladenovic’s Soldiers: A Story from Ferentari in addition to Jude’s “I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians,” The Dead Nation, The Happiest Girl in the World, Scarred Hearts, and Everybody in Our Family.

SATELLITE COLLECTIVE’S ECHO & NARCISSUS

Satellite Collective’s Echo & Narcissus debuts at BAM Fisher this weekend

BAM Fisher, Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
Friday, September 14, 8:00, and Saturday, September 15, 7:30, $25
www.bam.org
satellitecollective.org

New York City–based Satellite Collective is presenting the world premiere of its latest interdisciplinary ballet collaboration, Echo & Narcissus, at BAM Fisher’s Fishman Space on September 14 and 15. Some forty artists participated in the creation of the immersive work, which includes music, dance, opera, visual art, digital multimedia, and more, with live music and movement by ShoutHouse. The seventy-minute piece is set in New York City in 1971 and deals with such themes as selfishness, love, madness, and transformation in a world where people are obsessed with their own reflections. It was written by Satellite Collective artistic director Kevin Draper, composed by Aaron Severini, choreographed by Norbert De La Cruz III, and directed by Philip Stoddard, with film by Lora Robertson, projection design by Simon Harding, sets by Libby Stadstad, and production design by Draper. Among the performers are dancers Matteo Fiorani, Timothy Stickney, Joslin Vezeau, and Tara Youngmen and singers Christine Taylor Price and Stoddard. “We work at the intersection of dance, visual art, and music — and we use architects and poets as the glue,” Draper said in a statement. “Echo & Narcissus will be our first, focused, evening-length work where group action has to resonate in service to the story. We’re crafting a pretty high level of intensity for the audience.”

KING LEAR

Kent (Antony Byrne) is at the ready as Lear (Sir Antony Sher) enters in Royal Shakespeare production at BAM (photo by Richard Termine)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St.
April 7-29, $35-$125, 7:30 (plus weekend matinees)
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

Sir Antony Sher bids adieu to Shakespeare in a dark version of the already dark King Lear, continuing at BAM’s Harvey Theater through April 27. The Royal Shakespeare Company production takes place in a dank, dreary, dismal world reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa’s The Lower Depths, where poverty and disillusionment reign. As the audience enters the theater, robed and hooded figures slowly walk onstage from the wings and sit on a vinyl tarp covering the ground, which is strewn with black gravel, while hellish mist floats in. After several minutes, they leave and a door in the back wall opens; Lear, wearing an enormous, brutal, bearlike fur coat, makes his entrance, sitting on his throne atop a large box with transparent sides. The members of the court are all dressed in black, some with gold adornments, except for one woman, who we soon learn is Cordelia (Mimi Ndiweni). Prepared to divide his kingdom into thirds, Lear listens as first Goneril (Nia Gwynne), who is married to the Duke of Albany (Clarence Smith), then Regan (Kelly Williams), wed to the Duke of Cornwall (James Clyde), profess their undying love for their father, and each is rewarded with their share of the kingdom. But when Cordelia, the youngest daughter, tells Lear she loves him as a child should love a parent, refusing to damn him with faint praise, he disinherits her. Lear’s trusted friend and adviser, the Earl of Kent (Antony Byrne), questions the king’s decision, so he is exiled. Afterward, another of Lear’s advisers, the Earl of Gloucester (David Troughton), is tricked by his illegitimate son, Edmund (Paapa Essiedu), into believing that his older son, Edgar (Oliver Johnstone), has plotted against him, leading Edgar to run away and disguise himself as Poor Tom, a crazy wanderer. Things don’t go well from there for anyone in the play, which was inspired by Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland and Sir Philip Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music has been presenting Lear for more than 150 years, with a wide range of actors portraying the king, from Ernesto Rossi and Edwin Booth to Frank Langella and Sir Derek Jacobi. “It’s all Ian McKellen’s fault,” Sher writes at the beginning of his latest book, Year of the King: The Lear Diaries; McKellen played Lear at BAM in 2007. Directed by RSC artistic director Gregory Doran, Sher’s longtime partner, this Lear is more subtle than most, if that word can be used at all to describe the Bard’s monumental tragedy. The sixty-eight-year-old Sher plays Lear as a sad, gentle, at times spoiled child who is already in decline before completely unraveling. With great understatement he towers over everyone in the storm scene, high atop the box, video of a rushing waterfall raging behind him, but he has already lost it all. Byrne is a fine, forceful Kent, boasting a shaved head with a warriorlike tattoo; he’s determined to bring the king back to reality, but he knows it’s too late. Troughton is magnificent as Gloucester, a pathetic figure on his way to certain doom, his hair so disheveled you want to go onstage and hug him (and comb his dreary locks). Johnstone’s Edgar is heartbreaking as well, a kind of sprite who has been beaten down by a cruel world he can’t understand. And Graham Turner is a memorable Fool, a tall, strong clown whose mind and body break down over time.

Kent (Antony Byrne) attends to a failing Lear (Sir Antony Sher) as the Fool (Graham Turner) looks on (photo by Richard Termine)

Niki Turner’s set is mostly spare, with various objects, from small trees to chairs and tables to large circles on poles representing the sun and the moon, carried by the cast. The large box is a curious addition that might not completely work — perhaps it’s a metaphor for peering inside the minds of the characters, particularly Lear’s, or else is a sign of being trapped — but it is eerily effective in the blinding scene, blood spurting and splashing onto the transparent sides. Doran focuses on the act of seeing throughout the play, giving prominence to lines about sight and eyes. “What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes,” Lear tells Gloucester. “’Tis the times’ plague, when madmen lead the blind,” the Fool says to the old man (Edward James Walters). Tim Mitchell’s lighting, Jonathan Ruddick’s sound design, and Ilona Sekacz’s music, performed by musicians on balconies on the right and left of the stage, combine for a threatening atmosphere; the goings-on grow so somber that a surprising amount of the audience did not return after intermission for the second act, although I’d like to think that was more because those patrons were not prepared for nearly three and a half hours of gloom and doom. But this is Lear, after all, in this case featuring one of the world’s greatest Shakespearean actors taking his final Bard bow. It might be more of a whisper than a scream, but it is majestic and monumental nonetheless.

CELLULAR SONGS

Meredith Monk (left) and Vocal Ensemble perform Cellular Songs at BAM through March 18 (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St.
March 14-18, $25-$55
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.meredithmonk.org

Legendary interdisciplinary artist Meredith Monk offers a brief prologue to her latest evening-length work, Cellular Songs, with an audiovisual installation in the lobby at the BAM Harvey Theater. Five small monitors, side by side and just about at eye level, show five women (the primary cast of Cellular Songs) uttering sounds as the camera cuts from facial close-ups to just their mouths and to X-rays of the human brain and hand. It serves as an aperitif to the main course, a gorgeous seventy-five-minute piece incorporating experimental sound, movement, video, and lighting. The show begins with a film by Katherine Freer of five enormous hands projected on the stage floor, touching and clutching fingers. Monk then walks out with four members of her Vocal Ensemble, Ellen Fisher, Katie Geissinger, Allison Sniffin, and Jo Stewart, all dressed in loose-fitting white and beige costumes by Yoshio Yabara, who also designed the environment, which features several chairs, a piano in one corner, and a small pile of white clothes near the back. Individually and as a unit, the five women vocalize sounds that form unique rhythms, complemented by their movement, which includes lying on the floor, gathering around the piano, and sitting in a circle, holding hands. Joe Levasseur’s lighting goes from individual and group spots to bathing the production in reds and blues. In the program, Monk explains, “Some of the pieces have much more dissonance and chromatic kind of harmonies, and the forms are almost like three-dimensional sculptures. Earlier, my music had much more to do with layering. Now you can almost see or hear the piece rotating as if it were a sculpture in space, though it’s just a musical form.”

Meredith Monk gets closer to the earth in Cellular Songs at BAM (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Cellular Songs is a follow-up to the environmentally conscious On Behalf of Nature and was inspired by Siddartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. The seventy-five-year-old New York City native has taken the concept of the cell as both healthy and unhealthy biological unit and applied it to music, as if each note is a cell. The majority of the utterances by the five performers are just sounds, although at one point Monk (Songs of Ascension, Vessel) sings the song “Happy Woman,” in which she repeats “I’m a happy woman” over and over again, along with some other adjectives replacing “happy.” The work is about transcendence and connection, about the life cycle of birth, life, and death, as revealed when the Vocal Ensemble is joined by ten members of the Young People’s Chorus of New York City; the fifteen girls and women split into three sets of five by age, each group in slightly different costumes. As Monk also explains in the program, “As artists, we’re all contending with what to do at a time like this. I wanted to make a piece that can be seen as an alternative possibility of human behavior, where the values are cooperation, interdependence, and kindness, as an antidote to the values that are being propagated right now.” Cellular Songs is a multimedia celebration of hope in a deeply troubled era, offering tired souls the opportunity to immerse themselves in a uniquely uplifting aural and visual landscape that is free of sentimentality or rage, instead a place for contemplation, harmony, and more than a little magic.

SPECIAL SCREENING: THE MISSING PICTURE

Director Rithy Panh uses dioramas to fill in the gaps in Oscar-nominated The Missing Picture

THE MISSING PICTURE (L’IMAGE MANQUANTE) (Rithy Panh, 2013)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Tuesday, December 12, $15, 7:00
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.themissingpicture.bophana.org

In conjunction with the December 15-16 U.S. premiere of Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia as part of the 2017 Next Wave Festival, BAM is presenting Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture on December 12 at 7:00, with Panh participating in a postscreening Q&A with Ford Foundation program officer Chi-hui Yang. Winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes and nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award, The Missing Picture is a brilliantly rendered look back at the director’s childhood in Cambodia just as Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge began their reign of terror in the mid-1970s. “I seek my childhood like a lost picture, or rather it seeks me,” narrator Randal Douc says in French, reciting darkly poetic and intimately personal text written by author Christophe Bataille (Annam) based on Panh’s life. Born in Phnom Penh in 1964, Panh, who has made such previous documentaries about his native country as S21, The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and Duch, Master of the Forges of Hell and wrote the 2012 book L’élimination with Bataille, was faced with a major challenge in telling his story; although he found remarkable archival footage of the communist Angkar regime, there are precious few photographs or home movies of his family and the community where he grew up. So he had sculptor Sarith Mang hand-carve and paint wooden figurines that Panh placed in dioramas to detail what happened to his friends, relatives, and neighbors. Panh’s camera hovers over and zooms into the dioramas, bringing these people, who exist primarily only in memory, to vivid life. When a person disappears, Panh depicts their carved representatives flying through the sky, as if finally achieving freedom amid all the horrors.

He delves into the Angkar’s propaganda movement and sloganeering — the “great leap forward,” spread through film and other methods — as the rulers sent young men and women into forced labor camps. “With film too, the harvests are glorious,” Douc states as women are shown, in black-and-white, working in the fields. “There is grain. There are the calm, determined faces. Like a painting. A poem. At last I see the Revolution they so promised us. It exists only on film.” It’s a stark comparison to cinematographer Prum Mésa’s modern-day shots of the wind blowing through lush green fields, devoid of people. The Missing Picture is an extraordinarily poignant memoir that uses the director’s personal tale as a microcosm for what happened in Cambodia during the 1970s, employing the figures and dioramas to compensate for “the missing pictures.” Like such other documentaries as Jessica Wu’s Protagonist and In the Realms of the Unreal, Michel Gondry’s Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, Jeff Malmberg’s Marwencol, and Zachary Heinzerling’s Cutie and the Boxer, which incorporate animation, puppetry, and/or miniatures to enhance the narrative or fill in gaps, Panh makes creative use of an unexpected artistic technique, this time concentrating on painful history as well as personal and collective memory.