Tag Archives: film forum

LIFE AND NOTHING MORE

Robert (Robert Williams) attempts to charm Regina (Regina Williams) in Life and Nothing More

LIFE AND NOTHING MORE (Antonio Méndez Esparza, 2017)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Through Tuesday, November 6
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
www.cafilm.org/lanm

Antonio Méndez Esparza’s follow-up to his debut, Aquí y Allá, is a sensitive, beautifully paced film that lives up to its title: Life and Nothing More. Inspired by Italian neorealism, Esparza employs a cinema vérité style to tell the story of Regina (Regina Williams), an African American single mother struggling to get by in Florida. Regina has a delightful three-year-old daughter (Ry’Nesia Chambers) and a quiet, distant fourteen-year-old son, Andrew (Andrew Bleechington), who is starting to get in trouble with the law, hanging around with bad kids and carrying around a knife. Regina works menial minimum-wage jobs to try to keep the family afloat while the father of her children is in prison. Robert (Robert Williams), a newcomer to the town, starts trying to charm her, wanting to take her out, but Regina is suspicious of his intentions, as is Andrew. But when Robert shows the least bit of threatening anger as he and Andrew clash, Regina has some difficult decisions to make, which grow more complicated when other facts come to light.

Fourteen-year-old Andrew (Andrew Bleechington) has trouble connecting in Antonio Méndez Esparza’s Life and Nothing More

Cinematographer Barbu Balasoiu keeps his camera slow and steady as it lingers on scenes with very little or no dialogue, maintaining a tense mood that hovers over the film. As with Aquí y Allá, which was shot in Mexico, most of the actors are nonprofessionals in their first film, which heightens the reality. Regina Williams gives a strong, tenderhearted performance as the mother, a woman dedicated to making a better life for her children but continually runs into roadblocks beyond her control. Writer-director Esparza often focuses on her eyes as she watches events unfold, saying nothing but wanting to fight back more and more without risking the safety of her family. The film also smartly explores the incarceration gap between blacks and white without getting overtly political. Robert Williams (no relation) is engaging, with just the right hint of mystery and possible danger, while Bleechington reveals much with very few words, a boy who just can’t seem to say or do the right thing (when he speaks at all). Winner of awards at film festival around the world in addition to the Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award, Life and Nothing More is an honest, nuanced look at race and class in twenty-first-century America, an intelligent and heartbreaking depiction of what life is like for so many people today.

THE COMPLETE JEAN VIGO: L’ATALANTE

Michel Simon has loads of fun as a somewhat decrepit first mate in Jean Vigo’s classic L’Atalante

L’ATALANTE (Jean Vigo, 1934)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
September 21 – October 2
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

French auteur Jean Vigo made only three shorts and one feature before his death from tuberculosis and leukemia in 1934 at the age of twenty-nine, but his wide-ranging legacy continues. Film Forum pays tribute to his lasting influence on cinema with “The Complete Jean Vigo,” new 4K restorations of all of his works in addition to a new bonus. In Vigo’s fourth and final film, L’Atalante, his only feature, Swiss actor Michel Simon is spectacularly hilarious as an aging, somewhat decrepit first mate with a peculiar lust for life and cats. After barge captain Jean (Jean Dasté) and Juliette (Dita Parlo) get married in her small, tight-knit country town, they head for the big city of Paris on the long boat, L’Atalante, that he captains as his job. First mate Père Jules (Simon) and his young cabin boy (Louis Lefebvre) come along for the would-be honeymoon, attempting to make sure it’s a smooth ride, which of course it’s not. Juliette wants to enjoy the Parisian nightlife, Jean is a jealous, overprotective stick-in-the-mud, and Père Jules — well, Père Jules is downright unpredictable, pretty much all id, living life footloose and fancy free even if he doesn’t have much money or many true friends. When a love-struck bicycle-riding peddler (Gilles Margaritis) tries to woo Juliette, Jean grows angry, and an emotional and psychological battle ensues. But through it all, Père Jules just keeps on keepin’ on, never getting too concerned, confident that everything will work out in the end, because that’s what happens in life.

Film Forum honors Jean Vigo with 4K restorations of all four of his works, along with a bonus

The son of anarchist Miguel Almereyda, who chose his last name because it is an anagram of the French phrase for “there is shit,” Vigo had been labeled a subversive for his first film, the twenty-five-minute À propos de Nice, and his third, the forty-one-minute Zéro de conduite (Zero for Conduct), had been banned. So he went a little more conventional, at least for him, with L’Atalante, rewriting with Albert Riéra an original script by Jean Guinée. The film is an insightful tale of love and romance, of wealth and poverty, of hard social conditions, focusing on a wacky man who has experienced a lot in his life, even though he looks like a bum, reminiscent of Simon’s brilliant portrayal of Priape in Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning. Whether putting on a puppet show, displaying his tattoos, getting his fortune read, or walking around with cats on his shoulders, Père Jules is one of the most endearing and memorable characters in the history of cinema, a unique figure who surprises over and over again, and Simon’s portrayal is just amazing; it’s hard to believe that he was only thirty-nine when he made the picture.

The highly poetic film, featuring a lovely score by Maurice Jaubert, also echoes F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, only from a comic, often slapstick angle. After shooting was completed, Vigo’s already failing health took a turn for the worse, and a battle ensued over final cut involving the producers and editor Louis Chavance and cinematographer Boris Kaufman (Dziga Vertov’s brother, who went on to shoot such American classics as On the Waterfront and 12 Angry Men). Vigo died only a few weeks after L’Atalante was released. Film Forum is showing the restored director’s cut of L’Atalante from September 21 to October 2, along with “Vigo x 3,” consisting of À propos de Nice, the short documentary Jean Taris, and the restored director’s cut of Zéro de conduite. In addition, on September 30, Film Forum is screening Tournage d’hiver (Winter Shooting), a 2017 compilation of rushes and outtakes from L’Atalante and Zéro de conduite, narrated by film critic and historian Bernard Eisenschitz, who oversaw the restoration of L’Atalante.

GARRY WINOGRAND: ALL THINGS ARE PHOTOGRAPHABLE

Portrait of Garry Winogrand. Credit: Judy Teller

New documentary paints a fascinating portrait of street photographer Garry Winogrand (photo by Judy Teller)

GARRY WINOGRAND: ALL THINGS ARE PHOTOGRAPHABLE (Sasha Waters Freyer, 2018)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Wednesday, September 19
212-727-8110
www.winograndmovie.com
filmforum.org

There’s an intrinsic challenge about making a documentary about a photographer: How to portray the artist’s work, silent, still pictures of a moment in time, in a medium based on sound and movement. In Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable, producer, director, and editor Sasha Waters Freyer attacks that issue by delving deep into many of Winogrand’s photographs, lingering on them as friends, relatives, and colleagues rave about his glorious images. “Well, what is a photograph? I’ll tell you what a photograph is. It’s the illusion of a literal description of how a camera saw a piece of time in space,” Winogrand said in a 1975 lecture at the University of Texas Austin, later adding, “All it is is light on surface.” Of course, in Winogrand’s case, it is much more than that; the black-and-white pictures he took with his trusted Leica M4 inhale and exhale at the exciting pace of real life. “It’s this observation of human behavior, of human activity, human gesture, the relationships between people, whether they know each other or not, how we behave in the world,” curator Susan Kismaric says. Writer Geoff Dyer calls Winogrand’s work a “psychogestural ballet,” while photographer Matt Stuart looks at photo after photo, pointing out “the dance” in each one. “When things move, I get interested. I know that much,” Winogrand, who passed away in 1984 at the age of fifty-six, says in his gruff voice. “He had no ambition for fame or celebrity. He was totally obsessed and possessed by photography,” his good friend, photographer Tod Papageorge, says. “It was work work work work work.”

“New York, 1968” [laughing woman with ice cream] (photographs by Garry Winogrand, Collection Center for Creative Photography, the University of Arizona. © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco)

Freyer traces the life of “a city hick from the Bronx,” from his boyhood, when he had polio, through three marriages and three children, from his fear of nuclear war to his love of the female form, from the streets of New York City to California and Texas. She weaves in audio and video from lectures and interviews, filmed and taped conversations with photographer Jay Maisel, and photos and home movies of Winogrand and his family. Freyer speaks with photographers Thomas Roma, Jeffrey Henson Scales, Leo Rubinfien, Laurie Simmons, and Michael Ernest Sweet, curator Erin O’Toole, gallery owner Jeffrey Fraenkel (who compares Winogrand to Norman Mailer), Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, historian and critic Shelley Rice, and two of Winogrand’s ex-wives, Adrienne Lubeau and Judy Teller. There are also extensive quotes from legendary MoMA photography curator John Szarkowski. The film explores several turning points in his career, both good and bad, including the “New Documents” show with Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus; his seminal work in 1964; “The Animals,” a series shot at the Central Park Zoo, where he would go with his kids; his color work; Public Relations, in which he examined the role and effect of the mass media; and his controversial Women Are Beautiful book, which was labeled as sexist and misogynistic.

Influenced by such photographers as Robert Frank, Walker Evans, and Dan Weiner, Winogrand could not stop taking pictures. He took so many — the thought of his working in the digital age is both thrilling and frightening — that he didn’t even develop thousands of rolls, leaving behind a treasure trove of material that Roma explains was misinterpreted by critics. “I would like not to exist,” Winogrand said. It’s a good thing for the rest of us that he did, sharing his unique view of the world, incorporating the chaos of his personal life into his remarkable pictures. Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable, which features original music by Winogrand’s son, Ethan, and animation by Kelly Gallagher, opens September 19 at Film Forum, with Freyer participating in Q&As following the 7:00 shows on September 19 and 21. In her director’s statement, the Brooklyn-born Freyer writes, “In looking at Winogrand in all his multidimensional human complexity, I take aim at the ‘bad dad’ and ‘bad husband’ tropes in artist biography, seeking to undermine these as sources of triumph or artistic necessity. Winogrand was an artist whose rise and fall — from the 1950s to the mid-1980s — in acclaim mirrors not only that of American power and credibility in the second half of the twentieth century but also a vision of American masculinity whose limitations, toxicity, and inheritance we still struggle, culturally, to comprehend. The film ultimately invites a deeper consideration of Winogrand not only as a ‘man of his time,’ in the words of MoMA photography curator Susan Kismaric, but also as a man struggling to define himself simultaneously as an artist and a parent (as so many of us do).”

HIP HOP ON FILM 1979-1986: STATIONS OF THE ELEVATED

Cult subway graffiti film Stations of the Elevated is part of hip-hop series at Film Forum

STATIONS OF THE ELEVATED (Manfred Kirchheimer, 1981)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Thursday, September 20, 8:50
Series runs through October 20
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

In October 2014, thirty-three years after screening at the New York Film Festival, Manfred Kirchheimer’s Stations of the Elevated finally got its official U.S. theatrical release, in a gorgeous restoration that was shown at BAMcinématek and will be presented this week at Film Forum. In 1977, Manfred Kirchheimer, whose family escaped Nazi Germany in 1936, went to the Bronx and filmed graffiti-covered subway cars at the train depot and rushing across the elevated tracks, kids playing in a burned-out housing project, and giant billboards advertising hamburgers, cigarettes, alcohol, and suntan lotion. Shot on 16mm reversal stock, Stations of the Elevated is more than just a captivating document of a bygone era; it is a deeply poetic socioeconomic journey into class, race, art, and freedom of expression, told without a single word of narration or onscreen text. Instead, producer, director, editor, and photographer Kirchheimer (Colossus on the River, Bridge High with Walter Hess) shifts from the natural sound of the environment to a superb jazz score by Charles Mingus while cutting between shots of trains covered in tags and illustrations (and such phrases as “Heaven Is Life,” “Invasion of the Earth,” “Never Die,” and “Earth Is Hell”) by such seminal figures as Blade, Daze, Lee, Pusher, Shadow, and Slave and views of colorful billboards filmed peeking through the geometric architecture of the elevated railways and set against bright blue skies. Most often, the camera focuses on the painted eyes in the ads, looking right back at the viewer as they dominate the scene, evoking the optician’s ad in that famous novel of American class, The Great Gatsby. (The concentration on the eyes also predicts how Madison Ave. was watching the graffiti movement, eventually coopting the imagery into mainstream advertising.) Through this dichotomy of meaning and execution, Kirchheimer reveals similarities in artistic styles and how the elements influenced each other; a particularly telling moment occurs when a man is shown hand painting a billboard who could have just as well been spray painting a subway car.

Kirchheimer remains outside during the course of the forty-five-minute documentary, never venturing into the tunnels, capturing the elevated train lines as if they’re just another part of New York City architecture, which of course they are. And it’s especially powerful because it was made at a time when the city was in the midst of a severe economic crisis and rampant crime epidemic, as Mayor Koch sought to eliminate the scourge of graffiti, while Kirchheimer celebrates its beauty (and New York-ness) in this glorious little film. Stations of the Elevated, which elevates the station of subway graffiti artistry with an entrancing calmness, is screening September 20 at 8:50 in the Film Forum series “Hip Hop on Film 1979-1986” and will be followed by a Q&A with Kirchheimer and a live graffiti presentation by David “CHINO” Villorente. The series continues through October 20 with such other hip hop gems as Beat Street, featuring DJ Jazzy Jay, Kool Herc, Grandmaster Melle Mel, and Rae Dawn Chong, and the genre classic Wild Style, with director Charlie Ahearn participating in a Q&A after the 8:15 show on September 27.

KUSAMA: INFINITY

Documentary explores fascinating life and career of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (photo © Tokyo Lee Productions, Inc. / courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)

KUSAMA: INFINITY (Heather Lenz, 2018)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, September 7
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
www.kusamamovie.com

I remember the buzz in the room back in July 2012 at the press preview for the “Yayoi Kusama” retrospective at the old Whitney. Even among all the jaded art critics, there was palpable excitement at the rumor that Kusama herself might be attending the event. Alas, it was not to be. But now everyone can feel like they’re in the same room as the iconoclastic Japanese artist when watching Heather Lenz’s infinitely entertaining documentary, Kusama: Infinity, opening September 7 at Film Forum. Over the course of her seven-decade career, Kusama has explored the concepts of infinity and eternity through painting, sculpture, performance art, film, and installation, highlighted by an obsession with endless circles and mirrored reflections. “I convert the energy of life into dots of the universe. And that energy along with love flies into the sky,” she explains. Traumatic childhood experiences deeply influenced her life and art; she began painting when she was eight years old in rural Matsumoto City, where her unhappy parents ran a wholesale seed business (and her mother would tear up her drawings). Now eighty-nine, she still works every day, going from the Seiwa Hospital for the Mentally Ill, where she has lived voluntarily since 1977, to her studio, which is filled with her captivating works-in-progress. Lenz zooms in for extreme close-ups of the artist surrounded by canvases, as if she is the biggest dot (or seed?) in her universe. “So much of Kusama’s art seeks to re-create that [childhood] experience in one form or another,” notes Alexandra Munroe, senior curator of Asian Art at the Guggenheim. “It is literally an experience of being lost into her physical environment, of losing her selfhood in this space that is moving rapidly, and expanding rapidly.”

Artist Yayoi Kusama in the Orez Gallery in the Hague, Netherlands (1965) in KUSAMA - INFINITY. Photo credit: Harrie Verstappen. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

Artist Yayoi Kusama poses in the Orez Gallery in the Hague in 1965 (photo by Harrie Verstappen / courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)

Kusama was determined to be successful and to stand out from the crowd, as shown in dozens of color and black-and-white photographs of her in various kimono, dot-covered outfits, revealing apparel, and great hats, always sporting that unique bang hairstyle. “I promised myself that I would conquer New York and make my name in the world with my passion for the arts and my creative energy,” she explains. She was not about to let anything stop her, least of all her gender and her heritage. She was angry when it appeared that such artists as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and Lucas Samaras copied specific aspects of her work and gained greater notice for it. She sought advice from Georgia O’Keeffe. She got involved in an odd relationship with reclusive artist Joseph Cornell. She was shunned in her home country because of her penchant for nudity. She occasionally gets teary looking back at her life. The film features sensational archival video and photographs from some of Kusama’s seminal happenings and exhibitions, from “Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show” to “Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective” at CICA, from her “Narcissus Garden” intervention at the 1966 Venice Biennale, where she was selling individual mirror balls she had arranged on a lawn, to 1969’s “Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead,” in which the fiercely antiwar artist read “Thoughts on the Mausoleum of Modern Art” as eight participants ran around naked in MoMA’s sculpture garden. (This summer, Kusama brought “Narcissus Garden” to New York for MoMA PS1’s biannual Rockaway! show.) There are also clips from the revolutionary 1967 psychedelic art film Kusama’s Self-Obliteration, made by Jud Yalkut and Kusama.

Portrait of Yayoi Kusama in her studio. Image © Yayoi Kusama. Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore/Shanghai; Victoria Miro, London; YAYOI KUSAMA Inc.

At the age of eighty-nine, Yayoi Kusama still works in her studio every day (Image © Yayoi Kusama / courtesy of David Zwirner, New York; Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo/Singapore/Shanghai; Victoria Miro, London; YAYOI KUSAMA Inc.)

Lenz, who will participate in a Q&A at Film Forum on September 7 after the 7:45 screening, talks to a wide range of people who provide intriguing perspectives on the artist and her work, including Kusama dancer Jeanette Hart Coriddi, former Matsumoto City mayor Tadashi Aruga, David Zwirner director Hanna Schouwink, psychoanalyst and art collector Judith E. Vida, MD, longtime best friend Akira Iinuma, artists Carolee Schneemann, Ed Clark, and Frank Stella, curators Marie Laurberg and Lynn Zelevansky, Joshua Light Show founder Joshua White, and Yayoi Kusama Museum director Akira Tatehata. CUNY Kingsborough art history professor Midori Yamamura says, “Her diagnosis is of obsessive-compulsive neuroses. Once something enters into her mind, she cannot get rid of it.” Former art dealer Beatrice Perry of the Gres Gallery adds of Kusama’s Infinity Net series, “I’d never seen anything like it. They had some kind of magic. You couldn’t stop looking at them, and you didn’t know where they were going. They were hypnotic.” And gallery owner Richard Castellane remembers, “She was taking away your ability to focus, breaking all boundaries of space. . . . This was the great breaking point in art. No longer are you the viewer the master; she’s the master.” Kusama’s mastery is still evident today, as prices paid for her artwork continue to skyrocket — she’s recognized as the top-selling woman artist in the world — and fans wait on long lines for hours and hours to spend thirty seconds inside one of her Infinity Mirrored Rooms. In addition, Lenz has done a masterful job giving us a Kusama we have never seen before. Despite her difficult, challenging life, the extraordinary Kusama declares, “I want to live forever.” And in the very personal, intimate, and infinite world she has created and Lenz has masterfully revealed, who’s to say she won’t?

THE ATOMIC CAFE

America prepares for the bomb in The Atomic Cafe, the restored documentary that is returning to Film Forum

THE ATOMIC CAFE (Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader & Pierce Rafferty, 1982)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Wednesday, August 1
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

The time is ripe for a 4K restoration of the absurdist 1982 documentary The Atomic Cafe as President Trump deals with the nuclear capabilities and arsenals of Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, and Pierce Rafferty were searching archives for propaganda films when they discovered a treasure trove of military and government shorts about the atomic and hydrogen bombs and how the American people should face any oncoming threats. The filmmakers weaved sensational footage together into an hour and a half of clips that range from the hysterically funny to the dangerously outrageous. Young students are taught to “duck and cover.” Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets Jr. describes how easy it was to fly over Hiroshima and drop the bomb but then admits his shock over the eventual destruction it wrought. Presidents Harry S Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower discuss the impact of the bombs. A radio duo makes jokes about the decimation. Scenes of the horrific damage to Japanese victims are shown in silence. Vice Admiral W. H. P. Blandy defends the Bikini Atoll test, where island residents are assured everything will be fine — as are soldiers who will be in the vicinity of various tests.

While Russia escalates the Cold War — yes, they were our avowed enemy for quite some time, although the film includes President Richard Nixon joking around with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev — and a battle between North and South Korea looms, Americans drink “Atomic” cocktails and dance to “Atomic” songs. The execution of Ethel Rosenberg is explained in disturbing detail. A military officer tells the troops, “Watched from a safe distance, this explosion is one of the most beautiful sights ever seen by man,” and in a training film a military chaplain says to a few soldiers, “You look up and you see the fireball as it ascends up into the heavens; it’s a wonderful sight to behold.” Loader and the Raffertys fill the film with a vast array of black-and-white and color footage of nuclear bombs exploding into immense mushroom clouds, accompanied by a wide range of mood-enhancing music. It would be easy to dismiss most of the archival material in the film as ridiculous, outdated propaganda from a bygone era, but in this age of fake news, social media, lies from the White House, a war on journalism, and a president cozying up to enemies and taking issue with longtime allies, it’s more than a little bit frightening too. The Atomic Cafe opens August 1 at Film Forum — where it debuted in 1982 — with Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, and Pierce Rafferty participating in Q&As following the screenings on August 2 and 3 at 7:10 and August 4 at 5:10.

TWI-NY TALK: STEVE STERNER / STEVE STERNER SELECTS…

steve sterner selects

Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
August 1 – November 4
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

For thirty-five years, Bronx-raised actor, singer, conductor, composer, gambler, puzzlemeister, and arranger Steve Sterner has been playing piano accompaniment to silent films at such venues as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the old Thalia, and Film Forum, where he’s been the resident silent film composer/accompanist since 1987. Film Forum is honoring the self-described “bad improviser” with a series of his own, “Steve Sterner Selects . . . ,” running through November 4 and beginning August 1, when the institution reopens after a major renovation and the addition of a fourth theater. The festival consists of a dozen silent works chosen by the longtime Upper West Sider, who’s lived in the same rent-stabilized apartment on West Seventy-First Street since 1979. Among the films chosen by the sixty-seven-year-old Sterner, who will, of course, play piano at every screening — preceded by his traditional cough drop — are King Vidor’s Show People, which will be introduced by FF programmer extraordinaire Bruce Goldstein; Clarence Brown’s Flesh and the Devil, the first silent movie Sterner played music for; William Wellman’s Wings, winner of the first Best Picture Oscar; Edward Sedgwick’s The Cameraman, in which Buster Keaton is let loose on an unsuspecting New York City; and Sam Taylor’s lesser-known Exit Smiling. Sterner, who was also the subject of Paola Ochoa’s short 2014 documentary, The Accompanist, recently answered questions via email for twi-ny about his life and career.

twi-ny: When did you first realize you wanted to play piano accompaniment to silent films? Was there a eureka moment?

steve sterner: I never aspired to accompany silent films. I was thrown into it by Wayne Daigrepont, a cartoon collector on the staff at the Thalia theater.

twi-ny: What do you see as the primary responsibility of playing piano accompaniment?

ss: Be faithful to the film and enhance it as best you can.

Piano accompanist Steve Sterner will participate in a Q&A with Film Forum repertory programmer Bruce Goldstein following October 16 screening of A Hero for a Night

twi-ny: In the past, you have said that your playing should not be the focus, that the audience shouldn’t even notice you and instead should get lost in the film while you play. What does it feel like to now be the center of attention, putting together a series at Film Forum with your name in the title?

ss: The film is the star — I’m a supporting player. However, it’s always nice to be recognized when I’m not playing the piano.

twi-ny: On October 16, you will be sitting down with FF programming genius Bruce Goldstein for a discussion and Q&A in conjunction with a screening of William James Craft’s A Hero for a Night. What is it like working with Bruce?

ss: Working with Bruce has always been a joy. I think he’s one of the last great impresarios.

twi-ny: You’ve been doing this professionally since the early 1980s. Over those decades, has the audience changed at all? For example, are they any more or less attentive in this social-media-saturated age? And is the audience itself older, or are the younger generations showing up as well?

ss: I think the audience has gotten younger over the years, but other than that I haven’t paid much attention to the makeup of the audience.

twi-ny: For many years, you and Donald Sosin have been the go-to guys when it comes to this art form. Are you friends? Is there a competition between you for specific films or gigs?

ss: I wish I could play piano as well as Donald Sosin. I met him in the ’90s and have heard him play many times since. If there’s competition between us I’m unaware of it, but I’d never feel slighted to lose a job to him. He’s one of the best.

twi-ny: In addition to Film Forum, you’ve played numerous other New York City venues. Do you have a favorite (other than FF)?

ss: I enjoyed playing at the Thalia in the ’80s.

Ted Wildes Harold Lloyd silent comedy Kid Brother concludes Steve Sterner series November 4-5

Ted Wilde’s Harold Lloyd silent comedy Kid Brother concludes Steve Sterner series on November 3-4

twi-ny: Is there a specific silent film that you would love to play piano with but for some reason, either rights or the quality or existence of an acceptable print, you’ve been unable to?

ss: Any lost film that’s been unearthed.

twi-ny: Do you have a particular favorite silent film?

ss: The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg.

twi-ny: Favorite silent film director?

ss: Lubitsch, Hitchcock, Seastrom, Murnau, and others.

twi-ny: Favorite silent film composer?

ss: Charles Hoffman and William Perry.

twi-ny: Favorite sound film composer?

ss: Max Steiner.

twi-ny: Favorite silent film star?

ss: Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Lon Chaney, Clara Bow, and Douglas Fairbanks.

twi-ny: When you’re not accompanying silent films, what do you like to do for fun in New York City?

ss: I watch baseball and ’50s television shows on YouTube.