Tag Archives: Film at Lincoln Center

2021 NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL

Ian McKellen is one of several luminaries celebrating theater in Oren Jacoby’s On Broadway

The Jewish Museum
Film at Lincoln Center
January 13-26, $12 per film, all-access pass $125
virtual.filmlinc.org
thejewishmuseum.org

The New York Jewish Film Festival might not be celebrating its thirtieth anniversary in quite the style it was hoping, but it’s still hosting a stylish two weeks of fiction and nonfiction shorts and features as well as panel discussions and Q&As. Presented by the Jewish Museum and Film at Lincoln Center, the festival kicked off January 13 with Nir Bergman’s Here We Are (available through January 16), about divorced parents dealing with their grown autistic son; Bergman will participate in a free talk on January 14 at 2:00.

The 2021 centerpiece selection is Anders Østergaard and Erzsébet Rácz’s Winter Journey (available January 21), starring the great Bruno Ganz in his final role, playing flutist Günther “George” Goldschmidt, father of radio commentator Martin Goldsmith, who portrays himself in the film, based on his memoir, The Inextinguishable Symphony: A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany. Østergaard and Martin Goldsmith will discuss the film in a free talk on January 22 at 2:00.

The virtual festival concludes with another family affair, Susan Fanshel and Veronica Selver’s documentary Irmi (January 26), about German Jewish refugee Irmi Selver, Veronica’s mother, with Hanna Schygulla reading narration from Irmi’s memoirs. There will be a free talk with the directors January 27 at 2:00.

Among the other films to look out for are Judith Helfand’s Love & Stuff and Absolutely No Spitting (January 22), about the director’s adoption of a daughter when she was fifty, followed by the death of her mother; Ruthy Pribar’s Asia (January 15), with Unorthodox breakout star Shira Haas playing a teenager living with her single mother (Alena Yiv); and Oren Jacoby’s On Broadway (January 22), honoring the Great White Way with archival footage and interviews with Ian McKellen, Helen Mirren, Hugh Jackman, Christine Baranski, John Lithgow, and others. (You can watch Jacoby’s On Broadway: Give My Regard to Broadway, a short about Covid-19’s impact on theater, for free here.)

In addition, the festival has teamed up with the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan for a special MLK Day event, a live Q&A on January 18 at 2:00 with Dr. Shari Rogers about her documentary Shared Legacies, part of the JCC’s Cinematters: NY Social Justice Film Festival, which runs January 14-18. The film can be accessed beginning January 16 at 10:00 am here. Keep watching this space for select reviews as NYJFF 2021 continues.

THE SIGN PAINTER (CITY ON THE RIVER) (Viestur Kairish, 2020)
Available January 19 (ticket comes with director Q&A)
virtual.filmlinc.org

Latvian theater, opera, and film director Viestur Kairish’s The Sign Painter is in some ways a miniature Little Big Man meets Forrest Gump, where the audience watches history unfold through the eyes of a person who doesn’t really take an active part in what’s happening around him. Dāvis Suharevskis stars as Ansis, a tall, thin, gangly young man who works as a sign painter in a small Latvian village during the tumultuous decade before and during World War II, a town that changes leadership and primary color from the green of authoritarian dictator Kārlis Ulmanis to the red of Stalin’s Soviet Union to the black of Nazi Germany. Ansis has steady work: Each time a new regime takes over, he has to update street names and symbols, and he does so with a calm expertise, avoiding any personal political involvement. However, his true love, Zisele (Brigita Cmuntová), the daughter of pharmacist Bernshtein (Gundars Āboliņš) and who is reading Alexandra Kollontai’s Free Love, does get caught up in the tumult, taking up with German soldier Andreas (Aidas Jurgaitis) while Ansis is pursued by Naiga (Agnese Cīrule), as blond and Christian as Zisele is brunette and Jewish.

Ansis (Dāvis Suharevskis) is ever on the lookout for the next regime in The Sign Painter

Early on, aboard the small boat the White Swan, Ansis asks the captain, “May I steer?” It’s the only time he actively asserts being in charge of his direction. He wants to be a fine artist, and he is extremely talented at landscapes and portraits, but he carries on with his sign painting as revolution swirls about him.

Kairish (aka Viesturs Kairišs), who has made numerous documentaries in addition to the features Leaving by the Way, The Dark Deer, and The Chronicles of Melanie, and cinematographer Gints Bērziņš shoot nearly the entire film at a skewed angle, as if the characters can just fall off the screen in this continually upended world. They frame each shot with an artist’s eye; in one scene, Ansis speaks with Bernshtein while holding an empty picture frame, a spatial void that Zisele walks into. The story combines forbidden romance with religious, political, and military upheaval as one man continues to survive in dangerous times essentially despite himself, reminiscent of Jack Crabb in Little Big Man and Forrest Gump, who keep on keeping on. Based on a novel by Finnish-Latvian writer Gunars Janovskis, The Sign Painter is a beautifully rendered film about European collaboration, true love, regime change, and simple, everyday life.

THE LIGHT AHEAD (FISHKE DER KRUMER) (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1939)
Available January 25-28
virtual.filmlinc.org
jewishfilm.org

Jewish Austrian American auteur Edgar G. Ulmer is most well known for his atmospheric horror and crime films, including 1934’s satanic The Black Cat, which pits Boris Karloff against Béla Lugosi, 1944’s Bluebeard, with John Carradine as the multiple wife murderer, and 1945’s cult noir Detour, a genre favorite that was added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 1992. But Ulmer, who apprenticed with F. W. Murnau, also made a series of Yiddish shtetl films (Green Fields, The Singing Blacksmith) about life in poor Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, and the NYJFF is presenting the world premiere of one of them, the National Center of Jewish Film’s new 4K digital restoration of 1939’s The Light Ahead, beginning January 25.

The film is a heart-tugging melodrama about the fraught romance between a young blind woman, Hodel (Helen Beverley), and the lame Fishke (David Opatoshu), who earns a pittance by calling people to the baths in the tiny village of Glupsk. The town is thriving, with a fat surplus that the community leaders are deciding how to spend, but Reb Mendele (Izidore Cashier) and others have their own suggestions. The youngsters’ dream is to live in Odessa, the big city, but there’s not much chance of a bright future and times are dark, as is J. Burgi Contner and Edward Hyland’s cinematography, cast in a shadowy black-and-white.

Hodel (Helen Beverley) and Fishke (David Opatoshu) dream of a better future in The Light Ahead

The Light Ahead begins with a vaudeville-like comedy scene between Reb Mendele, Reb Alter (Leon Seidenberg), and Reb Isaak (Yudel Dubinsky) before turning serious. Most of the film depicts the people barely getting by as they deal with cholera, God’s will, prayer, and Galaganska chickens.

“What, I ask you, is the Jew’s life, anyway? An old story repeated over and over,” Mendele soliloquizes. “The form changes in every age. But the story remains the same. All the calamities, adversities, hardships, curses. All the troubles, afflictions, miseries, disasters. Every village has its rich, its paupers, its wise men, scholars, fools, ignoramuses, its stirrers of pots, its leading citizens, its innocent lambs and insolent ruffians. But always it’s the same old story.” It’s a story — inspired by a tale by Mendele Mokher Sforim, the Grandfather of Yiddish Literature — that Ulmer tells in charming, bittersweet ways, with intimate camerawork that sometimes makes it feel like a silent film.

The Light Ahead was made just before the start of WWII and the Holocaust, which destroyed so much of Eastern European shtetl life, so to watch it now is to experience a piece of erased history. The cast, made up of members of New York’s Artef and Yiddish Art Theaters, is led by Opatoshu in his first film; he would go on to appear in dozens of movies and television shows as well as on Broadway, including memorable TV roles on The Twilight Zone, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Star Trek, and The Outer Limits. There will be a members-only discussion about the film with J. Hoberman and Dan Sullivan on January 26 at 6:00; you can find out more here.

LIBERTÉ

Albert Serra’s Liberté vividly depicts a night of debauchery on the eve of the French Revolution

LIBERTÉ (Albert Serra, 2019)
Film at Lincoln Center
Through May 7, $12 for three-day rental
www.cinemaguild.com

Catalonian auteur Albert Serra’s Liberté seems tailor made for these challenging times, as so much of America hunkers down at home, sheltering in place because of the coronavirus. The fetishistic fête, which played festivals last year and is currently enjoying its exclusive virtual theatrical release via Film at Lincoln Center’s website, is a voyeur’s dream or nightmare, depending on how you look at sadomasochistic rituals and orgies. In Serra’s previous film, 2016’s brilliant The Death of Louis XIV, nearly all the action took place in the crowded bedchamber of the Sun King as he faced the end of his life. Liberté, set in a German forest, “a cursed place,” on the eve of the French Revolution, has a similarly claustrophobic feel. Both films were shot with three cameras: Serra’s technique means the actors don’t know which camera to perform to and don’t know exactly what the cameras are focusing on or which parts of their bodies are in the frame. In Liberté, this results in a dark vulnerability, especially given what body parts are shown, from afar and in extreme close-up.

For 132 slow-moving but intense minutes, we watch a cast of professional and nonprofessional actors touch themselves and one another, remove articles of extravagant clothing, perform ever-more-graphic acts of sex and violence (it’s often difficult to tell what is simulated and what is not), discuss bestiality, God and Jesus, killing, and politics, and, perhaps most important, gaze luridly at each other. In every scene, as we, the audience at home, follow the radical, vivid goings-on, at least one other character, and often more, are already in the composition, watching as well, or slowly entering the scene from the periphery, and our vision picks up the slightest motion emerging from behind a tree or a bush as we spot another voyeur, like a bug or a wild animal materializing from the darkness. At one point, a man with an extended spyglass peers around the area and ultimately faces us directly; thus, everyone knows they are being watched — we are all implicated. In addition, cinematographer Artur Tort rarely moves his camera; there are no active zooms, pans, or dollies, very little camera movement at all. Serra is not telling us what to look at; we scan the scenes individually, deciding for ourselves where to direct our attention (and what to turn away from). This is especially poignant when we are in our house or apartment on a computer, where we value our privacy and, perhaps, dabble in bits of pornography here and there, at least when our partners or children might not be around, which of course they always are now. Watching Liberté in a crowded theater with strangers would be a very different experience.

Liberté was first staged as a controversial German play in 2018 at the Volksbühne in Berlin, followed by the multimedia art installation Personalien at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid last year. The bold, daring cast, which improvises heavily throughout the film, features Helmut Berger as Duc de Walchen, Marc Susini as Comte de Tésis, Iliana Zabeth as Mademoiselle de Jensling, Laura Poulvet as Mademoiselle de Geldöbel, Baptiste Pinteaux as Duc de Wand, Théodora Marcadé as Madame de Dumeval, Alexander Garrcía Düttmann as Comte Alexis Danshir, Lluís Serrat as Armin, Xavier Pérez as Capitaine Benjamin Hephie, Cătălin Jugravu as Catalin, Montse Triola as Madam Montavrile, Safira Robens as Mademoiselle Rubens, and Francesc Daranas as the Libertine. While the women are beautiful by traditional standards, the men come in all shapes and sizes, some stunningly handsome but most not. The acts they perform will entice some viewers and disgust others; very little is left to the imagination (although there are no scenes of actual penetration).

The film recalls Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, David Cronenberg’s Crash, and William Friedkin’s Cruising, with an ample dose of Charles Bukowski, going well beyond Fellini’s Casanova, Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, and Tinto Brass’s Caligula. The costumes, compositions, and scenery, which includes a palanquin where certain more private seductions occur, were inspired by the Baroque paintings of Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard and François Boucher, lending an elaborate elegance that speaks to class, wealth, and power. Dialogue is sparse but striking. “Let me describe a scene that would be most pleasurable for me,” one man says. “Is that enough?” someone asks of a woman who cries out for more. “Finally, an image that satisfies me,” a character declares approvingly of a sight that might not satisfy you. Editors Ariadna Ribas, Serra, and Tort had more than three hundred hours of continuous footage to sift through, shot in less than three weeks, using no music till the end, the primary sounds being insects, groans, whispers, grunts, and screams. It has been intricately edited down to portray one debauched night during which no holds are barred and everyone can act as freely as they desire, societal morals be damned. We are immersed in this perverse world that grows more and more shocking by the second, exposed to tableaux most of us have never seen before onscreen – or in real life. Serra (Honor of the Knights, Birdsong, Story of My Death) is not judging anyone, and he’s not asking us to judge either, although you’ll be hard-pressed not to want to know more about the making of this ravishing, rebellious film and Serra’s intentions. To do so, check out his 2019 Q&A at the New York Film Festival and the May 3 online Q&A, although he only gives up so much.

NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL: BROKEN BARRIERS (KHAVAH)

Alice Hastings stars as lovestruck Khavah in rediscovered Broken Barriers

BROKEN BARRIERS (KHAVAH) (Charles E. Davenport, 1919)
Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center
165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
Sunday, January 19, 12:30
Festival runs January 15-28
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org
thejewishmuseum.org

The New York Jewish Film Festival pulls out a special treat on January 19, the world premiere of the National Center for Jewish Film’s restoration of the long-lost Broken Barriers, aka Khavah, the first cinematic adaptation of one of Sholem (Sholom) Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman stories. The tale will be familiar to fans of Fiddler on the Roof, although there are significant narrative distinctions. In a small Ukraine village, the Jewish Khavah (Alice Hastings), daughter of Tobias the Milkman (Giacomo Masuroff) and Golde (Billie Wilson), falls for the Russian Orthodox Fedka (Alexander Tenenholtz), son of Ivan (Phil Sanford), the chief constable, and Parasha (Sonia Radin), after one of Fedka’s friends (Raymond Friedgen) drunkenly assaults Khavah’s younger sister Tzeitel (Hanna [Ganna Kehlmann] Kay). As Fedka and Khavah consider marriage, Tobias (an alternate pronunciation of Tevye) grows angrier and forbids their relationship. But when a devastating government decree is delivered to Ivan, everyone reconsiders their future.

khava 2

Billed as “a love drama of the Ukraine” in the opening credits, Broken Barriers features actors from Maurice Schwartz’s Yiddish Art Theater on Irving Place (Schwartz would go on to famously play “Tevya” on stage and screen) and the Russian Opera Company; only Sanford had any cinematic experience, and it shows, as the acting is heavy-handed, especially by Hastings, who seems to be attempting to break barriers with her overemoting. (“Broken shall be the barriers that stand between me and happiness!” Khavah declares to her father.) But director Charles E. Davenport tells a tight little tale, limiting the amount of dialogue intertitles and including such poetic statements as “Conscience has a way of bringing us all to the realization that paternal efforts in our behalf are too lightly valued.” Cinematographers Irving B. Ruby and Jack Young shot the film outdoors in the New Jersey wild and in a Manhattan studio, effectively capturing the strife of a poor Ukrainian village while using superimposition to evoke memories. At the heart of the story is whether religious beliefs trump family; the reaction of Fedka’s parents and Khava’s are very different, as is the ending of this rediscovered nugget. The screening will be accompanied by live music by Donald Sosin. A joint presentation of Film at Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum, the festival continues through January 28 with such other works as Elise Otzenberger’s My Polish Honeymoon, Rachel Rusinek and Eyal Ben Moshe’s I Was Not Born a Mistake, and Dror Zahavi’s closing night selection, Crescendo, about an attempt to establish an Israeli-Palestinian youth orchestra.

NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL OPENING NIGHT SELECTION: AULCIE

The life and times of Aulcie Perry on and off the court are documented in New York Jewish Film Festival opener

AULCIE (Dani Menkin, 2019)
Walter Reade Theater, Film at Lincoln Center
165 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
Thursday, January 16, 8:30
Festival runs January 15-28
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org
thejewishmuseum.org

Israeli director Dani Menkin follows up his 2016 documentary, On the Map, about Maccabi Elite Tel Aviv’s unlikely victory in the 1976-77 European Champions Cup, with an inside look into the life of one of its stars in Aulcie, the opening night selection of the New York Jewish Film Festival. After being the last man cut from the New York Knicks in 1976, Newark native Aulcie Perry was recruited to play for Maccabi in Israel, where the 6-10 black man — an unusual sight in the Land of Milk and Honey — quickly became a superstar, helping the team to championships, falling in love with top model Tami Ben Ami, and hanging out in hot clubs, living the high life. But it all came tumbling down in a haze of drugs, and Menkin traces Perry’s attempt to put it all back together, primarily by finding the daughter he has not seen since she was a baby.

The film is set up as Perry’s confession to that daughter, Cierra Musungay. “I always knew one thing: that I wanted to tell you my story, the way it is, with the good and the bad,” he says at the beginning. “So where do I start? People say you start at the beginning. But I wanted to start at the end, or when I thought the end was coming.” He was inspired to track her down after facing a serious health scare. “I think, that only when I almost died, I started to really live. And that’s when I wanted to find you and, maybe in some ways, find myself,” he adds.

Top model Tami Ben Ami and basketball superstar Aulcie Perry are shown as the hot couple in Aulcie

Menkin goes back and forth between archival footage, animation by Assaf Zellner, and interviews with Aulcie’s sister Bernadine Lewis, his friends Wayne Tyre and Roy Young, his ex-girlfriend Juanita Jackson, his son Aulcie Perry Jr., and many men from his Maccabi family, including former teammates Earl Williams and Tal Brody, team president Shimon Mizrahi, co-owner Oudi Recanati, coach Zvi Sherf, and manager Shamluk Maharovsky, who was like a father to him. “In Israel, there wasn’t that much prejudice against black players, and he felt at home here,” NBA commentator Simmy Reguer says. “Aulcie came in like a blessing from the gods,” fellow Jersey native and team captain Brody recalls. And Sports Illustrated writer Alexander Wolff explains, “At Maccabi Tel Aviv, Aulcie Perry was Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar rolled into one.”

Now sixty-nine, Perry is honest and forthright thorughout, admitting his failings and wanting to make up for lost time. He makes no excuses for his precipitous fall, and he’s not seeking sympathy. He’s a man who made mistakes and wants a chance to set things right. Aulcie is a cautionary tale of redemption with heart and soul, focusing on the need to be part of a family, no matter how different and unexpected it may be. Aulcie is having its New York City premiere January 16 at 8:30 at the Walter Reade Theater, with Perry, Menkin, and producer Nancy Spielberg (brother of Steven) participating in a Q&A. Aulcie might be the opening selection of the New York Jewish Film Festival, but the twenty-ninth annual fest actually kicks off a day earlier with Picture of His Life, a documentary codirected by Menkin and Yonatan Nir about Yom Kippur War veteran and underwater photographer Amos Nachoum, showing on January 15 at 1:00, with Menkin, Spielberg, and Nachoum present. A joint presentation of Film at Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum, the festival continues through January 28 with such other works as Marceline Loridan-Ivens’s centerpiece The Birch Tree Meadow, starring Anouk Aimée and August Diehl, a fiftieth anniversary presentation of Vittorio De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and Dror Zahavi’s closing night selection, Crescendo, about an attempt to establish an Israeli-Palestinian youth orchestra.

VARDA — A RETROSPECTIVE: KUNG-FU MASTER!

Julien (Mathieu Demy) and Mary-Jane (Jane Birkin) fall for each other in Agnès Varda’s Kung-Fu Master!

KUNG-FU MASTER! (LE PETIT AMOUR) (Agnès Varda, 1988)
Film at Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Monday, January 6, 9:15
Series continues through January 8
www.filmlinc.org

Film at Lincoln Center’s “Varda: A Retrospective” continues January 6 with a real family affair, Agnès Varda’s curiously compelling 1988 drama Kung-Fu Master!, the French title of which is the more appropriate Le petit amour, or “The Little Love.” Written by Varda and English actress, model, and singer-songwriter Jane Birkin from Birkin’s idea, the film stars Birkin as Mary-Jane, a divorced forty-year-old woman living with her fourteen-year-old daughter, Lucy, portrayed with wide-eyed innocence by Charlotte Gainsbourg, Birkin’s real-life daughter with French superstar Serge Gainsbourg, and her younger child, Lou, played by Lou Doillon, Birkin’s daughter with French director Jacques Doillon. Mary-Jane falls in love practically at first sight with one of Lucy’s classmates, fourteen-year-old Julien, portrayed by Mathieu Demy, Varda’s son with French auteur Jacques Demy. Birkin’s parents, actress and playwright Judy Campbell and fine artist and actor David Birkin, play Mary-Jane’s mother and father, while Birkin’s brother, screenwriter Andrew Birkin, plays her brother. And Varda’s daughter, costume designer, actress, and producer Rosalie Varda, will be at the Walter Reade Theater on January 6 to introduce the screening. Varda often liked to blur the line between fiction and nonfiction, but don’t let all that reality confuse you: Kung-Fu Master! is most certainly not a documentary, thank goodness.

Mother and daughter Jane Birkin and Charlotte Gainsbourg star as mother and daughter in Kung-Fu Master!

Somewhat reminiscent of Bertrand Blier’s 1981 Beau-père, in which thirty-year-old Rémi (Patrick Dewaere) falls for his fourteen-year-old stepdaughter, Marion (Ariel Besse), Kung-Fu Master! treads in dangerous territory, exploring a taboo love, even as it does so with care and sensitivity and a tender performance by Birkin. Mary-Jane is well aware that she should not be considering a relationship with a young boy, but she has a yearning to explore the furthest boundaries of desire. However, her choice of Julien is beyond strange, as he is an ordinary teen, who plays Dungeons and Dragons and the arcade game Kung-Fu Master! and has banal conversations with his peers; he is not some hulking, mature figure who is smart and sophisticated for his age. “I know I won’t be around when you start shaving,” Mary-Jane tells Julien. The film also refers repeatedly to the AIDS crisis, which the teenagers are only just learning about and dismiss as somebody else’s problem. Varda never brings the AIDS subplot full circle; perhaps it’s there primarily to emphasize the dangers sex can bring, but she leaves that thread hanging. You’re likely to feel dirty watching Kung-Fu Master!, but you also won’t be able to look away. (Birkin/Gainsbourg fans will also want to check out “Birkin Gainsbourg The Symphonic Starring Jane Birkin” at the Beacon Theatre on March 6, with special guests Iggy Pop and Charlotte Gainsbourg.)

VARDA: A RETROSPECTIVE

The remarkable life and career of Agnès Varda is being celebrated by Film at Lincoln Center (Agnès Varda © Cine Tamaris)

Film at Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
December 20 – January 6
www.filmlinc.org

“I live in cinema. I feel I’ve lived here forever,” Agnès Varda memorably said. The Belgian-born French filmmaker, photographer, and visual artist died earlier this year at the age of ninety, leaving behind an innovative and influential legacy that is being celebrated by Lincoln Center as we say goodbye to 2019 and welcome in 2020, albeit without one of the greatest of all time. “Varda: A Retrospective” is already under way at Film at Lincoln Center, comprising more than two dozen features, documentaries, and shorts, from 1955’s La Pointe Courte to 2019’s Varda by Agnès, and boasting such unique and astounding works as Le bonheur, Cléo from 5 to 7, The Gleaners and I, Vagabond, and, yes, Kung-Fu Master! (with Jane Birkin and Charlotte Gainsbourg!). Every afternoon beginning at 1:00, “Free Loop: Agnès Varda Q&As at Film at Lincoln Center” will be shown for free in the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Amphitheater, while the five-part series Agnès Varda: From Here to There will screen in the Walter Reade Theater December 22 at 12:30, December 23 at 2:00, and December 24 at 1:00, free with advance registration. There is also a free gallery exhibition with rare archival footage, photographs, and ephemera related to Varda and her remarkable career and life, which included a nearly thirty-year marriage to auteur Jacques Demy, with whom she had two children, producer and costume designer Rosalie Varda and actor and director Mathieu Demy. Varda’s The Young Girls Turn 25, which creates a reunion of the cast and crew of her husband’s The Young Girls of Rochefort where that classic was shot, can be seen December 27 and January 2. Below are only some of Varda’s best; as a bonus, from January 4 to 6, Rosalie Varda will introduce and/or participate in Q&As at half a dozen screenings.

Agnès Varda takes an unusual approach to autobiography in The Beaches of Agnès

THE BEACHES OF AGNÈS (LES PLAGES D’AGNÈS) (Agnès Varda, 2008)
Tuesday, December 24, 4:15
Sunday, December 29, 6:00
Sunday, January 5, 6:00 (introduced by Rosalie Varda)
www.filmlinc.org

“The whole idea of fragmentation appeals to me,” 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, One Hundred and One Nights) 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 January 5 screening will be introduced by Rosalie Varda.

JR and Agnès Varda have a blast in the masterful Faces and Places

JR and Agnès Varda have a blast with people and animals in the masterful Faces and Places

FACES PLACES (VISAGES VILLAGES) (Agnès Varda & JR, 2017)
Tuesday, December 24, 2:15
Monday, December 30, 8:30
Wednesday, January 1, 8:45
www.filmlinc.org
cohenmediagroup.tumblr.com

“We’ll have fun making a film,” legendary eighty-eight-year-old Belgian-born French auteur Agnès Varda tells thirty-three-year-old French photographer and street artist JR in Faces Places (Visages Villages), a masterful road movie that may very well be the most fun film of 2017. The unlikely pair first met when Varda accepted an invitation from JR, whose practice involves wheat-pasting giant black-and-white photos of men, women, and children on architectural structures, to visit his Paris studio. (JR brought his “Inside Out” art project to Times Square in 2013.) When Varda saw JR’s blow-up of a 1960 self-portrait Varda shot of herself standing in front of a Bellini painting in Venice, the two instantly hit it off and decided to make a film together, heading out in JR’s small photo-booth truck to team up with people in small towns throughout France, including coal miners, dockworkers, farmers, a church-bell ringer, and factory workers. The reactions of the villagers — shrewd, curious, flattered — to JR’s enormous wheat-pasted blow-ups of themselves on their neighborhood walls, barns, abandoned housing, containers, water towers, and other locations are fascinating. “JR is fulfilling my greatest desire. To meet new faces and photograph them, so they don’t fall down the holes of my memory,” Varda, who edited the film with Maxime Pozzi-Garcia, says. Varda and JR make a formidable duo, finding a childlike innocence in their collaboration that is simply captivating to watch.

Cinematic collaboration between Agnès Varda and JR results in stunning visions of humanity

Varda continually tries to get JR to remove his ever-present dark glasses, remembering how her friend and colleague Jean-Luc Godard once let her take pictures of him without glasses, but JR prefers to maintain his mystery, a man who photographs tens of thousands of people’s faces around the world while never fully showing his own. Varda, who relies on the “power of imagination,” even sets up an afternoon with Godard at his home in Switzerland, preparing by having JR roll her furiously through the same Louvre galleries the protagonists run through in Godard’s Band of Outsiders, but of course nothing with Godard ever goes quite as planned. “Chance has always been my best asset,” Varda proclaims in the film, and it is chance, and the willingness to enthusiastically embrace every moment of life, that helps give Faces Places its immeasurable charm. The film, which features a playful score by Matthieu Chedid (‑M-) and was executive produced by Varda’s daughter, Rosalie Varda-Demy, subtly tackles socioeconomic issues but is primarily a marvelous celebration of genuine humanity.

Cléo (Corinne Marchand) looks back at her life in Agnès Varda’s Nouvelle Vague classic

CLEO FROM 5 TO 7 (CLÉO DE 5 À 7) (Agnès Varda, 1962)
Wednesday, December 25, 8:30
Saturday, December 28, 4:30
Saturday, January 4, 7:00 (introduced by Rosalie Varda)
www.filmlinc.org

After getting a biopsy taken and drawing the death card while consulting a fortune-teller, popular French singer Cléo (Corinne Marchand) begins looking back at her life — and wondering just what’s left of it — while awaiting the dreaded results. The blonde beauty talks with old friends, asks her piano player (Michel Legrand, who composed the score) to write her a song, and meets a dapper gentleman in the park, becoming both participant and viewer in her own existence. As Cléo makes her way around town, director (and former photographer) Agnès Varda (Jacquot de Nantes, Lions Love [. . . and Lies]) shows off early 1960s Paris, expertly winding her camera through the Rive Gauche. Just as Cléo seeks to find out what’s real (her actual name is Florence and that gorgeous hair is a wig), Varda shoots the film in a cinema verité style, almost as if it’s a documentary. She even sets the film in real time (adding chapter titles with a clock update), enhancing the audience’s connection with Cléo as she awaits her fate, but the movie runs only ninety minutes, adding mystery to what is to become of Cléo, as if she exists both on-screen and off, alongside the viewer. A central film in the French Nouvelle Vague and one of the first to be made by a woman, Cléo de 5 à 7 is an influential classic even as it has lost a step or two over the years. The January 4 screening will be introduced by Varda’s daughter, Rosalie Varda.

François (Jean-Claude Drouot) tries to convince Thérèse (Claire Drouot, his real-life wife), that he has plenty of happiness to spread around in Le Bonheur

LE BONHEUR (HAPPINESS) (Agnès Varda, 1965)
Thursday, December 26, 3:00
Saturday, January 4, 9:00 (introduced by Rosalie Varda)
www.filmlinc.org/films/le-bonheur

In 1965, French Nouvelle Vague auteur Agnès Varda said about her third film, Le Bonheur, which translates as Happiness: “Happiness is mistaken sadness, and the film will be subversive in its great sweetness. It will be a beautiful summer fruit with a worm inside. Happiness adds up; torment does too.” That is all true nearly fifty years later, as the film still invites divided reaction from critics. “Miss Varda’s dissection of amour, as French as any of Collette’s works, is strikingly adult and unembarrassed in its depiction of the variety of love, but it is as illogical as a child’s dream,” A. H. Weiler wrote in the New York Times in May 1966. “Her ‘Happiness,’ a seeming idyll sheathed in irony, is obvious and tender, irresponsible and shocking and continuously provocative.” All these decades later, the brief eighty-minute film is all that and more, save for the claim that it is illogical. In a patriarchal society, it actually makes perfect, though infuriating, sense.

François and Émilie (Marie-France Boyer) seek out their own happiness in Nouvelle Vague classic

François (Jean-Claude Drouot) and Émilie (Marie-France Boyer) seek out their own happiness in Nouvelle Vague classic

French television star Jean-Claude Drouot (Thierry La Fronde) stars as the handsome François, who is leading an idyllic life with his beautiful wife, Thérèse (Claire Drouot), and their delightful kids, Pierrot (Olivier Drouot) and Gisou (Sandrine Drouot), in the small, tight-knit Parisian suburb of Fontenay. While away on a job, François meets the beautiful Émilie (Marie-France Boyer), a postal clerk who connects him to his wife via long-distance telephone, flirting with him although she knows he is happily married. And despite being happily married, François returns the flirtation, offering to help with her shelves when she moves into an apartment in Fontenay. Both François and Émilie believe that there is more than enough happiness to go around for everyone, without any complications. “Be happy too, don’t worry,” Émilie tells him. “I’m free, happy, and you’re not the first,” to which he soon adds, “Such happiness!” And it turns out that even tragedy won’t put a stop to the happiness, in a plot point that angered, disappointed, confused, and upset many critics as well as the audience but is key to Varda’s modern-day fairy tale. The January 4 screening will be introduced by Varda’s daughter, Rosalie Varda.

The beauty of nature plays a key role in Le Bonheur

Le Bonheur is Varda’s first film in color, and she seems to have been heavily influenced by her husband, Jacques Demy (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Young Girls of Rochefort), bathing the film in stunning hues that mimic Impressionist paintings, particularly the work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, in a series of picnics and flower-filled vases. In a sly nod, at one point a black-and-white television is playing the 1959 film Le Déjeuner Sur L’herbe (“Picnic on the Grass”), which was directed by Jean Renoir, one of Auguste’s sons, and also deals with sex, passion, procreation, and nature. Le Bonheur also features numerous scenes that dissolve out in singular blocks of color that take over the entire screen. Cinematographers Claude Beausoleil and Jean Rabier shoot the film as if it takes place in a candy-colored Garden of Eden, all set to the music of Mozart, performed by Jean-Michel Defaye. Varda doesn’t allow any detail to get away from her; even the protagonists’ jobs are critical to the story: François is a carpenter who helps builds new lives for people; Thérèse is a seamstress who is in the midst of making a wedding gown; and Émilie works in the post office, an intermediary for keeping people together. As a final touch, François, who represents aspects of France as a nation under Charles de Gaulle, and his family are played by the actual Drouot clan: Jean-Claude and Claire are married in real life (and still are husband and wife after nearly sixty years later), and Olivier and Sandrine are their actual children, so Le Bonheur ends up being a family affair in more ways than one.

Agnès Varda looks back at her past in charming Daguerréotypes

DAGUERRÉOTYPES (Agnès Varda, 1975)
Tuesday, December 31, 4:00
www.filmlinc.org

Legendary auteur Agnès Varda’s eighty-minute documentary, Daguerréotypes, 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 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, a former photographer, 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.