Tag Archives: bamcinematek

PLUS ÇA CHANGE: FRENCH NEW WAVE IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM

Good luck figuring out what Godard’s Film Socialisme is about

FILM SOCIALISME (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Friday, September 8, 7:00 & 9:30
Series runs September 8-17
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

In the late 1950s and 1960s, the French New Wave exploded around the world, redefining cinema through independent production and the auteur theory, led by such innovative directors as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer, Alain Resnais, and Jacques Rivette. Fifty years later, several of these filmmakers were still creating outstanding motion pictures, as evidenced by the BAMcinématek series “Plus ça change: French New Wave in the New Millennium,” running September 8-17. The twelve-film festival kicks off September 8 with Godard’s highly contentious and polemical Film Socialisme, his first work to be made fully in high-definition digital video. After watching the 2010 film, I was not quite sure what I had just witnessed. There was beautiful imagery shot by Fabrice Aragno and Paul Grivas, pretentious and funny literary dialogue and narration taken from such writers as Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Walter Benjamin, appearances by punk icons Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye, and archival footage from old movies, divided into three sections: The first (“Such Things”) takes place on a cruise ship (that capsized a few years later), the second (“Our Europe”) at a gas station, and the third (“Our Humanities”) a trip through the Mediterranean, with stops at Egypt, Palestine, Odessa, Hellas, Naples, and Barcelona. There’s bullfighting, Stalin, Hitler, soccer, a llama, war, cats on the internet, and a girl reading Balzac’s Lost Illusions. There’s also anti-Semitism, with parts of the film inspired by Léon Daudet’s Le Voyage de Shakespeare and Godard using the name Palestine instead of Israel. In doing research on Film Socialisme to try to find out what I had seen — not usually a good sign for a movie — I found lavish five-star reviews, angry one-star condemnations, and a series of fascinating essays by Richard Brody in the New Yorker discussing, among other things, Stalin looting the Spanish treasury, Godard’s fondness for tennis, and the strange story of Willi Münzenberg. And of course, there are statements about life and cinema, truth and fiction. “You see, with the verb ‘to be,’ the lack of reality becomes flagrant,” one character says. “Liberty is expensive. But one can’t buy her with gold, and not with blood but with cowardice, prostitution, and betrayal,” another says. Film Socialisme comes to an abrupt end as the words “No Comment” take over the screen in a stark, bold sans serif font. ’Nuf said.

In addition to the below films, the series includes Resnais’s You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet and Wild Grass, Chabrol’s The Girl Cut in Two, Varda’s The Gleaners & I, Rohmer’s The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, and Rivette’s The Duchess of Langeais.

Jeanne Balibar is extraordinary in Jacques Rivette masterpiece

VA SAVOIR (WHO KNOWS?) (Jacques Rivette, 2001)
Saturday, September 9, 2:00, 6:30
www.bam.org

Jacques Rivette’s Va Savoir is a long, talky French movie about very beautiful, very complicated, sex-crazed men and women — and it just might be the master filmmaker’s crowning glory, a magnificent masterpiece that deserved its slot as the New York Film Festival’s opening night selection back in 2001. This erotically charged, very funny drama is set around a traveling theater company’s return to Paris to put on Pirandello’s As You Desire Me in the original Italian. Ugo (Sergio Castellitto), the director and costar of the play, is romantically involved with Camille (Jeanne Balibar), the lead actress, who visits her former lover Pierre (Jacques Bonnaffé), a philosopher with a thing for Heidegger, who is now living with Sonia (Marianne Basler), a dance instructor who is being chased by Arthur (Bruno Todeschini), a ne’er-do-well whose half sister, Do (Hélène de Fougerolles), has taken a liking to Ugo and offers to help him find an unpublished ghost play by Carlo Goldini, which her mother (Catherine Rouvel) just might have. Every minute of this film is pure magic, and at the center of it all is the fantastique Camille, an instinctual, graceful actress whom everyone — men and women — fall in love with, played by the fantastique, instinctual, graceful Balibar, whom audiences will fall in love with as well. French film enthusiasts should watch for Claude Berri in a small role. Lovingly photographed by William Lubtchansky and edited by his wife, Nicole Lubtchansky, Va Savoir is screening at 2:00 and 6:30 on September 9 in the BAMcinématek series “Plus ça change: French New Wave in the New Millennium.”

Chris Marker goes in search of smiling felines in The Case of the Grinning Cat

THE CASE OF THE GRINNING CAT (Chris Marker, 2006)
Sunday, September 10, 2:00, 5:15, 8:30
www.bam.org

Legendary cat lover and filmmaker Chris Marker (La Jetée, Sans Soleil) goes on a search for a friendly feline in the slight, playful hour-long documentary The Case of the Grinning Cat. In post-9/11 Paris, when much of the world was proclaiming “We are all Americans,” Marker discovered a series of stenciled yellow cats showing up in odd places, from the sides of buildings to internet sites to classical works of art. After disappearing for a short time — causing Marker great frustration — they return as placards and masks at protest movements against U.S. imperialism and other causes. Although the film is fun to watch, it never quite connects all the dots. The Case of the Grinning Cat is screening at 2:00, 5:15, and 8:30 on September 10 in the BAMcinématek series “Plus ça change: French New Wave in the New Millennium.”

Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language speaks for itself

GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE (ADIEU AU LANGAGE) (Jean-Luc Godard, 2014)
Saturday, September 16, 2:00, 4:30, 7:00, 9:30
www.bam.org
www.kinolorber.com

After the New York Film Festival advance press screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s 3D Goodbye to Language in 2014, a colleague turned to me and said, “If this was Godard’s first film, he would never have had a career.” While I don’t know whether that might be true, I do know that Goodbye to Language is the 3D flick Godard was born to make, a 3D movie that couldn’t have come from anyone else. What’s it about? I have no idea. Well, that’s not exactly right. It’s about everything, and it’s about nothing. It’s about the art of filmmaking. It’s about the authority of the state and freedom. It’s about extramarital affairs. It’s about seventy minutes long. It’s about communication in the digital age. (Surprise! Godard does not appear to be a fan of the cell phone and Yahoo!) And it’s about a cute dog (which happens to be his own mutt, Miéville, named after his longtime partner, Anne-Marie Miéville). In the purposefully abstruse press notes, Godard, eighty-three at the time, describes it thusly: “the idea is simple / a married woman and a single man meet / they love, they argue, fists fly / a dog strays between town and country / the seasons pass / the man and woman meet again / the dog finds itself between them / the other is in one / the one is in the other / and they are three / the former husband shatters everything / a second film begins / the same as the first / and yet not / from the human race we pass to metaphor / this ends in barking / and a baby’s cries.” Yes, it’s all as simple as that. Or maybe not.

Jean-Luc Godard has fun with 3D in Goodbye to Language

Godard divides the film into sections labeled “La Nature” and “La Métaphore,” cutting between several ongoing narratives, from people reading Dostoyevsky, Pound, and Solzhenitsyn at an outdoor café to an often naked man and woman in a kitchen to clips of such old movies as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Snows of Kilimanjaro to Lord Byron and the Shelleys on Lake Geneva. Did I say “narrative”? It’s not really a narrative but instead storytelling as only Godard can do it, and this time in 3D, with the help of cinematographer Fabrice Aragno. Godard has a blast with the medium, which he previously used in a pair of recent shorts. He has fun — and so do we — as he toys with the name of the film and the idea of saying farewell (he plays with the French title, Adieu au langage, forming such puns as “Ah, dieu” and “Ah, dieux,” making the most of 3D layering); creates superimpositions and fast-moving shots that blur the image, making the glasses worthless; changes from sharp color to black-and-white to wild pastel-like bursts of red, blue, and green; evokes various genres, with mystery men in suits and gunshots that might or might not involve kidnapping and murder; and even gets a kick out of where he places the subtitles. These games are very funny, as is the voiceover narration, which includes philosophy from such diverse sources as Jacques Ellul (his essay “The Victory of Hitler”) and Claude Monet (“Paint not what we see, for we see nothing, but paint that we don’t see”). And for those who, like my colleague, believe the film to be crap, Godard even shows the man sitting on the bowl, his girlfriend in the bathroom with him, directly referencing Rodin’s The Thinker and talking about “poop” as he noisily evacuates his bowels. So, in the end, what is Godard saying farewell to? Might this be his last film? Is he saying goodbye to the old ways we communicated? Is he bidding adieu to humanity, leaving the future for the dogs, the trees, and the ocean? Does it matter? A hit at Cannes, Goodbye to Language is screening September 16 at 2:00, 4:30, 7:00, and 9:30 in the BAMcinématek series “Plus ça change: French New Wave in the New Millennium.” You can check out the NSFW French trailer here.

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

THE BEACHES OF AGNÈS (LES PLAGES D’AGNÈS) (Agnès Varda, 2008)
Sunday, September 17, 2:00
www.bam.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 & 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 September 17 at 2:00 in the BAMcinématek series “Plus ça change: French New Wave in the New Millennium.”

JONATHAN DEMME: HEART OF GOLD — NEIL YOUNG TRUNK SHOW / NEIL YOUNG: HEART OF GOLD

Neil Young lets it all hang out in Jonathan Demme concert film (photo by Larry Cragg)

NEIL YOUNG TRUNK SHOW (Jonathan Demme, 2009)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Sunday, August 20, 7:00
Series runs through August 24
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.trunkshowmovie.com

BAMcinématek’s three-week tribute to Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme, who passed away in April at the age of seventy-three, continues with a pair of outstanding concert films. In April 2005, Neil Young underwent brain surgery for an aneurysm. Four months later, he gathered together friends for two special nights at Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium, captured on film by Demme, who had previously helmed such fab music docs as Stop Making Sense and Storefront Hitchcock. Neil Young: Heart of Gold was an intimate portrait of man who looked death in the face and survived; the film featured acoustic songs primarily from Young’s beautiful Prairie Wind album. But the Godfather of Grunge wasn’t about to let a little thing like a brain aneurysm stop him from rocking in the free world. As he continued his long-term project of reaching deep into his past for his archival box sets, he released Chrome Dreams II in October 2007, a sequel to an unreleased 1977 album that was rumored to include such future Young classics as “Pocahontas,” “Like a Hurricane,” “Homegrown,” and “Powderfinger.” For Chrome Dreams II, Young strapped on the electric guitar and held nothing back, joined by longtime partners in crime Ralph Molina on drums, Rick Rosas on bass, and Ben Keith on guitars and keyboards.

Young took the show on the road, playing small clubs across the country, where each song was announced by a live painting by Eric Johnson. Demme captured two searing performances at the Tower Theater in Pennsylvania, filming them guerrilla-style with eight cameras, mostly handheld, that get right up in Young’s face. While the actual concerts were divided into two separate sets, first solo acoustic, then electric with the band, which also featured backup vocals by then-wife Pegi Young and Anthony “Sweetpea” Crawford, Demme mixes them up in Neil Young Trunk Show, an exhilarating music documentary that limits behind-the-scenes patter and instead concentrates on the powerful music. At the time, Young had been at the game for nearly fifty years, but he plays with a young man’s abandon in the film, his eyes deep in thought on such gorgeous acoustic gems as “Harvest,” “Ambulance Blues,” “Sad Movies,” and “Cowgirl in the Sand” while really letting loose with extended jams on the new “Spirit Road” and “No Hidden Path” before tearing everything apart on “Like a Hurricane.” The sixty-two-year-old Canadian legend even includes an instrumental from his high school days with the Squires, “The Sultan,” complete with Cary Kemp banging a gong. As with most Young concerts, Trunk Show is not about the greatest hits; to truly enjoy it, just let the music take you away – and make sure the theater has the volume turned up loud. The movie is screening August 20 at 7:00 as part of the “Jonathan Demme: Heart of Gold” retrospective and will be followed by a Q&A with cinematographer Declan Quinn and camera operators Charlie Libin, Kathleen Corgan, Gerard Sava, Patrick Capone, Hollis Meminger, and Anthony Jannelli.

Jonathan Demme will present NEIL YOUNG: HEART OF GOLD at Stranger Than Fiction screening at IFC Center on October 18

Neil Young reveals his heart of gold in Jonathan Demme concert film

NEIL YOUNG: HEART OF GOLD (Jonathan Demme, 2006)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Sunday, August 20, 4:30
Series runs through August 24
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

The BAMcinématek screening of Neil Young Trunk Show will be preceded by another stellar collaboration between Jonathan Demme and Neil Young, Neil Young: Heart of Gold. In March 2005, less than a week before a scheduled operation for a brain aneurysm, Canadian country-folk-rock legend Neil Young headed to Nashville, assembled friends and family, and in four days recorded one of the best — and most personal — albums of his storied four-decade career, Prairie Wind. On August 18, he had recovered enough to put on a poignant show at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, captured on film by Demme, whose previous music-related works included Talking Heads in Stop Making Sense, Robyn Hitchcock in Storefront Hitchcock, and videos by the Pretenders and Bruce Springsteen. The concert film begins with brief interviews with band members as they prepare for the show; Demme does not harp on Young’s health but instead focuses on the music itself and the warming sense of a family coming together. And what music it is.

Using an ever-changing roster of participants, including Emmylou Harris, then-wife Pegi Young, steel guitarist Ben Keith, keyboardist Spooner Oldham, bass player Rick Rosas, the Nashville String Machine, the Fisk University Jubilee Singers, the Memphis Horns, and others, Young goes song by song through Prairie Wind (skipping only the Elvis tribute “He Was the King,” which can be found as an extra on the DVD), a moving album written by a man looking death squarely in the face. (Pegi Young points out that it was like Neil’s life flashing before his eyes.) Young introduces several songs with stories about his recently deceased father, growing up on a chicken farm, his daughter’s departure for college, and Hank Williams, whose guitar Young plays. (He also does a few songs on a Steinway.) Cinematographer Ellen Kuras (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan) gets up close and personal with Young, zooming in for extended shots of his face, his eyes peeking out from under his cowboy hat. Eleven years later, Young is still at the top of his game, releasing great new music and playing incendiary live shows. “Jonathan Demme: Heart of Gold” continues through August 24 with The Master Builder, Ricki and the Flash, a program of music videos, and a double feature of What’s Motivating Hayes and Haiti Dreams of Democracy.

IN CONCERT: SHUT UP AND PLAY THE HITS

James Murphy says farewell to LCD Soundsystem in multifaceted concert documentary

SHUT UP AND PLAY THE HITS (Dylan Southern & Will Lovelace, 2011)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Sunday, August 6, 7:30
Series runs through August 13
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.shutupandplaythehits.com

On April 2, 2011, after ten years of building a devoted following that was still growing, electronic dance-punk faves LCD Soundsystem played what was supposed to be its farewell show at Madison Square Garden. Directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace, who previously documented the British band Blur in No Distance Left to Run, capture the grand finale in the often bumpy, sometimes revelatory concert film Shut Up and Play the Hits. The movie is divided into three distinct sections that take place before, during, and after the massive blowout, with Southern and Lovelace weaving between them. There is extensive footage of the event at the Garden, including performances of such LCD classics as “Dance Yrself Clean,” “All My Friends,” “Us v Them,” “North American Scum,” and “Losing My Edge.” Although the multicamera approach tries to make you feel like you’re there, onstage and backstage with front man Murphy, keyboardist Nancy Whang, bassist Tyler Pope, drummer Pat Mahoney, and various special guests, it lacks a certain emotional depth, and the sound, primarily during the first songs, is terrible, although that could have been the fault of the tiny theater where we saw it more than the film itself. The second section features music journalist Chuck Klosterman (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto) interviewing Murphy at the Spotted Pig in the West Village a week before the concert, asking inane, annoying questions that Murphy strains to answer.

But the most fascinating part of the film by far, and how it starts, involves Murphy the day after the show. He allows the camera to follow him everywhere, from waking up in his bed with his dog to carefully shaving with an electric razor to visiting the DFA offices for the first time in a year. It’s hard to believe that the night before he was a grandiose rock star but now he is walking his pooch, sitting on a bench in front of a coffee shop, and spending most of the day alone. The camera gets right into his face, showing every gray hair, zooming in on his puffiness and his deep-set, nearly dazed eyes. The film would have benefited from less time with Klosterman and more with Murphy as he contemplates his past, present, and future. It also would have been interesting to hear from the other members of the band, but Shut Up and Play the Hits is specifically about Murphy, who, at forty-one, suddenly doesn’t know what to do with his life, having left an extremely successful gig that was only gaining popularity. (However, in January 2016 the band reunited, once again hitting the road, including a fab headlining gig at the Panorama festival that July.) Shut Up and Play the Hits is screening August 6 at 7:30 in the BAMcinématek series “In Concert,” which continues through August 13 with such other live-music films as Bill and Turner Ross’s Contemporary Color, D. A. Pennebaker’s Monterey Pop, and Mel Stuart’s Wattstax.

SOUTHERN GOTHIC: THE BEGUILED

Clint Eastwood in The Beguiled

THE BEGUILED (Donald Siegel, 1971)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
June 26-30
Series runs June 26 – July 11
718-636-4100
www.bam.org

In conjunction with the theatrical release of Sofia Coppola’s remake of The Beguiled, which earned her the Best Director award at Cannes, BAMcinématek is hosting the sixteen-film series “Southern Gothic,” which begins with, appropriately enough, Don Siegel’s twisted 1971 original, based on Thomas P. Cullinan’s 1966 novel, A Painted Devil. On the outskirts of Mississippi, Union corporal John “McB” McBurney is seriously wounded and found in the woods by twelve-year-old Amy (Pamelyn Ferdin), who has been gathering mushrooms for dinner. The hirsute hunk is brought to Mrs. Farnsworth’s Seminary for Young Ladies to convalesce before Martha Farnsworth (Geraldine Page) turns him over to the Confederates. (The film was shot at the Ashland-Belle Helene Plantation in Louisiana.) Confined to bed until he starts getting around on crutches, McB becomes an object of romantic interest to several of the girls and women in the house, including the kindhearted Edwina (Elizabeth Hartman), who is about to become a partner in the school; the innocent Amy, who compares the wounded soldier to an injured crow; the devilishly wicked Carol (Jo Ann Harris); and Martha herself, who has been running the school and former farm by herself since the death of her beloved brother. Also intrigued by McB’s presence are young students Abigail (Melody Thomas), Lizzie (Peggy Drier), and Janie (Pattye Mattick) while Doris (Darleen Carr) doesn’t understand why they’re all helping the enemy and considers turning him in. The only one seeing the situation clearly is the slave Hallie (blues singer Mae Mercer), who discusses the concept of freedom with the corporal — who is not quite the heroic, Jesus-like figure the girls think he is — in one of the film’s most intelligent scenes. It all reaches its apex one crazy night, setting up quite a finale.

The Beguiled was the third of five movies Siegel (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Killers) made with Eastwood, after 1968’s Coogan’s Bluff and 1970’s Two Mules for Sister Sarah and before 1971’s Dirty Harry and 1979’s Escape from Alcatraz. It is both a feminist and sexist fantasy that is more than a little bit creepy; the original trailer referred to the females at Mrs. Farnsworth’s seminary as “man-eager girls.” The film also deals with patriotism and treason, incest and pedophilia, trust and lies, first love and sexual jealousy, and a sadomasochistic ideals of pleasure and pain that relates to the painting on Mrs. Farnsworth’s bedroom wall, Sandro Botticelli’s late-fifteenth-century “Lamentation over the Dead Christ.” Six-time Oscar nominee and Emmy and Grammy winner Lalo Schifrin’s score is all over the place, from Baroque and Renaissance music to twentieth-century melodrama and horror; in addition, an offscreen Eastwood himself mumbles the antiwar theme song, “The Dove She Is a Pretty Bird,” heard at the beginning and end of the film. Eastwood is at his stern best in The Beguiled, while Emmy and Oscar winner Page (Interiors, The Trip to Bountiful) is elegantly fragile and Oscar nominee Hartman (A Patch of Blue, Walking Tall) is achingly virginal. (The two women also costarred in Francis Ford Coppola’s underseen You’re a Big Boy Now.) The film, both a love story and a revenge thriller that is very possibly a likely influence on Stephen King’s Misery, constantly borders on misogyny but manages to raise the issue more than exploit it by the grisly end. It’s an extremely strange movie, one of the oddest ever made about the Civil War, and, as the title warns, absolutely beguiling. The Beguiled is screening June 26-30 at BAM; “Southern Gothic” continues through July 11 with such other films as Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou, John Huston’s Wise Blood, Andrei Konchalovsky’s Shy People, Robert Aldrich’s Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and Luis Buñuel’s The Young One.

POLK AWARDS: HOOLIGAN SPARROW

Hooligan Sparrow risks her freedom and her life for protesting for women’s rights in China

HOOLIGAN SPARROW (Nanfu Wang, 2016)
BAMcinématek, BAM Rose Cinemas
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
Wednesday, April 5, $14, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
hooligansparrow.com

The 2016 Human Rights Watch Film Festival kicked off last year with Nanfu Wang’s alarming debut feature documentary, Hooligan Sparrow, for which she won the annual Nestor Almendros Award for courage in filmmaking. On April 5, it will have a special screening and Q&A at BAM in honor of its latest accolade, the George Polk Documentary Film Award, an annual presentation from LIU. The film is a brave, disquieting look at Chinese activist Ye Haiyan, better known as Hooligan Sparrow, an advocate for sex workers’ rights, as she leads protests against a school principal who sexually abused six elementary school girls. “If you film us, we’ll smash your camera,” a man tells Wang at the beginning. Later she’s told she will be beaten if she doesn’t hand over her equipment. But she’s determined to keep telling the story any way she can. Sparrow, who gained notoriety for a project in which she offered free sex to migrant workers, is joined by Shan Lihua, Tang Jitian, Jia Lingmin, Wang Yu, and lawyer Wang Jianfen as she battles law enforcement, the government, and brothel owners, her safety and freedom in constant jeopardy. “If I believe something is right and I’m obliged to do it, they can’t stop me by arresting me or even killing me,” she defiantly says. She and her daughter, Lan Yaxin, keep getting evicted from their homes and banned from numerous provinces, but that doesn’t prevent her from protesting with such signs as “All China’s Women’s Federation Is a Farce. China’s Women’s Rights Are Dead” and “You Can Kill Me, But You Can’t Kill the Truth.” Born and raised in a remote Chinese farming village and currently based in New York City, Wang, who directed, produced, photographed, and edited Hooligan Sparrow, never backs down even as she meets with Chinese officials and is followed everywhere she goes, forced to become suspicious of nearly everyone she encounters. “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you,” Joseph Heller wrote in Catch-22. Wang clearly has reason to be paranoid.

The film is executive produced by Andy Cohen and Alison Klayman, who collaborated on the award-winning documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry; the Chinese artist and activist, who had been under long-term house arrest, took up Hooligan’s cause, and he included her belongings in an installation in his 2014 Brooklyn Museum retrospective, “According to What?” Wang, who has three master’s degrees, cowrote the film with Mark Monroe, who wrote the Oscar-nominated documentary The Cove and numerous Sundance winners. Hooligan Sparrow also features a subtly ominous score by Nathan Halpern and Chris Ruggiero that helps keep you on the edge of your seat as Hooligan and her group continue to fight the power, despite each of them being detained and imprisoned at one point or another — and some still are. Hooligan Sparrow is being shown April 5 at 7:30 at BAM, followed by a Q&A with the Brooklyn-based Wang and Polk Awards screening committee co-chair Richard Pearce. “Hooligan Sparrow is a remarkable and courageous work,” Polk Awards curator John Darnton said in a statement. “In filming it, in the face of intimidation by undercover security thugs, Ms. Wang herself turns into a dissident. She begins somewhat nervously, even timidly, and then becomes emboldened before our very eyes, employing wily devices like hidden-camera glasses and secret audio to get the documentation she needs.” The Polk Awards are named for CBS correspondent George Polk, who was brutally murdered while covering the Greek civil war in 1948; last year’s George Polk Documentary Film Award went to Matthew Heineman’s Oscar-nominated Cartel Land.

BATSHEVA DANCE COMPANY: LAST WORK

Batsheva Dance Company will perform LAST WORK at BAM February 1-4 (photo by Gadi Dagon)

BAM Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
February 1-4, $25-$65, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org
www.batsheva.co.il

Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin and his Batsheva Dance Company return to BAM this week with Last Work, which, happily, is not the outstanding troupe’s farewell piece. Previously at BAM with 2014’s Sadeh21 and 2012’s Hora, Batsheva is presenting the New York premiere of the sixty-five-minute Last Work, which debuted in 2015 at the Suzanne Dellal Centre in Tel-Aviv. Gaga guru Naharin’s collaborators include lighting designer Avi Yona Bueno (Bambi), soundtrack designer Maxim Warratt, stage designer Zohar Shoef, composer Grischa Lichtenberger, and costume designer Eri Nakamura; the piece, which melds the personal with the political in unpredictable and surprising ways, will be performed by William Barry, Yael Ben Ezer, Matan Cohen, Omri Drumlevich, Bret Easterling, Hsin-Yi Hsiang, Rani Lebzelter, Ori Moshe Ofri, Rachael Osborne, Nitzan Ressler, Ian Robinson, Kyle Scheurich, Or Meir Schraiber, Maayan Sheinfeld, Yoni Simon, Bobbi Jene Smith, Zina (Natalya) Zinche, and Nakamura. In addition, Tomer Heymann’s new documentary about Naharin and Batsheva, Mr. Gaga, will be shown at BAMcinématek on January 30, followed by a Q&A with Naharin and producer Barak Heymann, moderated by Wendy Perron. The film opens February 1 at Film Forum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, with several screenings followed by Q&As and Gaga demonstrations.

BAM NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL: THE TREE OF LIFE WITH LIVE MUSIC

Wordless Music Orchestra will perform new score to Terence Malick’s THE TREE OF LIFE at BAM

THE TREE OF LIFE (Terrence Malick, 2005)
BAMcinématek, Howard Gilman Opera House
30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.
November 18-19, $35-$85, 7:30
718-636-4100
www.bam.org/thetreeoflife
www.twowaysthroughlife.com

Iconoclastic writer-director Terrence Malick had made only five feature films in his forty-plus-year career when The Tree of Life came out in 2011, and it might very well be his best. And now you can see it like never before, as the BAM Next Wave Festival presents it in the Howard Gilman Opera House with a live score performed by more than one hundred singers and musicians from New York City’s Wordless Music Orchestra playing works by Mahler, Berlioz, Brahms, Górecki, Mozart, Tavener, Smetana, Couperin, and others, conducted by Ryan McAdams and featuring Robert Fleitz on piano and sopranos Charles Love and Jennifer Zetlan. Following Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), and The New World (2005), The Tree of Life is an epic masterpiece of massive proportions, a stirring visual journey into the beginning of the universe, the end of the world, and beyond. The unconventional nonlinear narrative essentially tells the story of a middle-class Texas family having a difficult time coming to grips with the death of one of their sons in the military. Malick cuts between long flashbacks of Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) in the 1950s and 1960s, as they meet, marry, and raise their three boys, to the present, when Jack (Sean Penn), their eldest, now a successful architect, is still searching for answers. The sets by production designer Jack Fisk transport viewers from midcentury suburbia to the modern-day big city and a heavenly beach, all gorgeously shot by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. Every frame is so beautiful, it’s as if they filmed the movie only at sunrise and sunset, the Golden Hour, when the light is at its most pure. The Tree of Life is about God and not God, about faith and belief, about evolution and creationism, about religion and the scientific world. The film opens with a quote from the Book of Job: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation . . . while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” Early on, Mrs. O’Brien says in voice-over, “The nuns taught us there are two ways through life: The way of nature, and the way of grace. You have to choose which one to follow.” Malick leaves those questions open, displaying the miracles of life and death and everything in between as perhaps the only response.

Jessica Chastain, Hunter McCracken, and Brad Pitt star in Terrence Malick’s epic masterpiece, THE TREE OF LIFE

With the help of Douglas Trumbull, the special effects legend behind 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind — and who hadn’t been involved in a Hollywood film in some thirty years — Malick travels through time and space, using almost no CGI. Instead, he employs images from the Hubble telescope along with Thomas Wilfred’s flickering “Opus 161” art installation, which evokes a kind of eternal flame that appears in between the film’s various sections. Malick rolls the Big Bang, dinosaurs, and the planets into this inner and outer head trip of a movie that will leave you breathless with anticipation at where he is going to take you next — and where he goes is never where expected, originally accompanied by Alexandre Desplat’s ethereal orchestral score, which has been completely replaced for these screenings. But perhaps more than anything else, The Tree of Life, which won the Palme d’Or at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for three Oscars (for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Cinematography), is about the act of creation, from the creation of the universe and the world to the miracle of procreation (and the creation of cinema itself). Mr. O’Brien is an inventor who continually seeks out patents but always wanted to be a musician; he plays the organ in church, but his dream of creating his own symphony has long been dashed. And Jack is an architect, a man who creates and builds large structures but is unable to get his own life in order. In creating The Tree of Life, Malick has torn down convention, coming up with something fresh and new, something that combines powerful human emotions with visual wizardry, a multimedia poem about life and death, the alpha and the omega. And now you can hear it in a different way as well as this special performance makes its U.S. premiere at BAM’s grand opera house.