Tag Archives: film forum

BRUCE WEBER: CHOP SUEY

Bruce Weber focuses in on Peter Johnson and others in cinematic hodgepodge

CHOP SUEY (Bruce Weber, 2001)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Wednesday, November 20, 7:00
Series continues through November 21
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
www.bruceweber.com

Fashion photographer Bruce Weber, who directed the seminal Chet Baker doc Let’s Get Lost a quarter century ago, made this fun hodgepodge of still photos, old color and black-and-white footage, and new interviews and voice-over narration back in 2001. You might not know much about Frances Faye, but after seeing her perform in vintage Ed Sullivan clips and listening to her manager/longtime partner discuss their life together, you’ll be searching YouTube to check out a lot more. The film also examines how Weber selects and treats his male models, who are often shot in homoerotic poses for major designers (and later go on to get married and have children). As a special treat, Jan-Michael Vincent’s extensive full-frontal nude scene in Daniel Petrie and Sidney Sheldon’s 1974 Buster and Billie is on display here, as are vintage clips of Sammy Davis Jr., adventurer Sir Wilfred Thesiger, former Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, and Robert Mitchum singing in a recording studio with Dr. John. The film is about model Peter Johnson and Weber as much as it is about the cult of celebrity; Weber gets to chime in on Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, Clark Gable, Frank Sinatra, Arthur Miller, and dozens of other famous names and faces. Though an awful lot of fun, the film is disjointed, lacking a central focus, and the onscreen titles, end credits, and promotional postcards are chock-full of typos — perhaps emulating a Chinese takeout menu, hence the film’s title? Chop Suey is screening November 20 at 7:00 as part of Film Forum’s “Bruce Weber” series and will be preceded by Weber’s twelve-minute 2008 short, The Boy Artist; the series continues through November 21 with a 35mm print of Let’s Get Lost, 1987’s Broken Noses, about former Olympian boxer Andy Minsker, 2004’s A Letter to True, a tribute to Weber’s dog, and a compilation of shorts, videos, commercials, and works in progress.

ILYA AND EMILIA KABAKOV: ENTER HERE

Emilia and Ilya Kabakov discuss their life and work in new documentary (photo by Jacques De Melo)

ILYA AND EMILIA KABAKOV: ENTER HERE (Amei Wallach, 2013)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
November 13-26
212-727-8110
www.kabakovfilm.com
www.filmforum.org

“Epic and boring,” Russian newspaper Vedomosti wrote in a review of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s highly anticipated 2008 Moscow exhibition; the same can be said about Amei Wallach’s documentary about the renowned Russian art couple, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here. Wallach assembled the same team she worked with on 2008’s Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine (except for her late codirector, Marion Cajori) to follow the Kabakovs as they prepare for a major series of shows in six venues in Moscow, marking Ilya’s return to the city for the first time since fleeing the country twenty years earlier. Wallach is given virtually unlimited access to Ilya, a soft-spoken conceptual artist filled with fascinating and unusual ideas, and Emilia, whom he married in 1992 and who handles his business affairs and assists her husband in the studio. Wallach delves into Ilya’s past as a struggling artist who was rarely allowed to show his work publicly and became part of an underground avant-garde that also included Oleg Vassiliev, Igor Makarevich, and Andrei Monastyrsky, all of whom appear in the film, as does Robert Storr, Matthew Jesse Jackson, and other scholars. Much of Ilya’s work is innately, if not overtly, political, evoking a changing Russia / Soviet Union as it evolved through such leaders as Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev, quietly exploring many sociopolitical elements of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The film’s emotional high point involves a voiceover reading a letter from Ilya’s mother that she wrote to him when she was eighty, as the camera takes viewers through such monumental yet intimate and personal installations as “Red Wagon” and “The Toilet.” Among the other works featured are “The Palace of Projects,” “Life of Flies,” “Labyrinth (My Mother’s Album),” “School No. 6,” “How to Meet an Angel,” and “Alternative History of Art,” in which Ilya is joined by his past and future alter egos, Charles Rosenthal and Igor Spivak.

The Kabakovs attend the opening of their 2008 Moscow exhibition, marking their highly anticipated return to the city

Unlike such other recent art documentaries as Cutie and the Boxer and Gerhard Richter Painting, which focused on unique and engaging characters, the Kabakovs are not particularly entertaining in and of themselves; it’s their work that makes them fascinating, so some stretches of the documentary drag on a bit, and it is difficult for Wallach and editor-cinematographer Ken Kobland to capture on film the feeling of what it is like to experience one of the Kabakovs’ massive installations. (However, it is possible for New Yorkers to see “Catch the Little White Man,” which is on view along with seven paintings at Pace Gallery in Midtown through December 21.) But Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here is still a treat, offering an inside look at a husband and wife who are considered the most important Russian artists alive today. “The first thing to say is that art is another world,” Ilya explains early on. “And one must leave one’s body and one’s mentality, and one’s blah, blah, blah . . . and one’s everyday element, and enter another world. This is the major purpose and aim of our work. Leave and come with me to another world.” That’s a difficult offer to pass up. Enter Here begins a two-week run at Film Forum on November 13, with Ilya and Emilia on hand to talk about the film at select screenings on November 13, 16, 23, and 24; the 7:50 show on November 23 will be followed by a Q&A with Wallach and Kobland.

FILM FORUM JR.: MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON

Jimmy Stewart takes filibustering to a whole new level in MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON

CLASSICS FOR KIDS AND THEIR FAMILIES: MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON (Frank Capra, 1939)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Sunday, November 3, $7, 11:00 am
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

We love Jimmy Stewart; we really do. Who doesn’t? But last year we had the audacity to claim that Jim Parsons’s performance as Elwood P. Dowd in the 2012 Broadway revival of Harvey outshined that of Stewart in the treacly 1950 film, and now we’re here to tell you that another of his iconic films is nowhere near as great as you might remember. Nominated for eleven Academy Awards, Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington caused quite a scandal in America’s capital when it was released in 1939, depicting a corrupt democracy that just might be saved by a filibustering junior senator from a small state whose most relevant experience is being head of the Boy Rangers. (The Boy Scouts would not allow their name to be used in the film.) Stewart plays the aptly named Jefferson Smith, a dreamer who believes in truth, justice, and the American way. “I wouldn’t give you two cents for all your fancy rules,” Smith says of the Senate, “if, behind them, they didn’t have a little bit of plain, ordinary, everyday kindness and a little looking out for the other fella, too.” He’s shocked — shocked! — to discover that his mentor, the immensely respected Sen. Joseph Harrison Paine (played by Claude Rains, who was similarly shocked that there was gambling at Rick’s in Casablanca), is not nearly as squeaky clean as he thought, involved in high-level corruption, manipulation, and pay-offs that nearly drains Smith of his dreams. As it nears its seventy-fifth anniversary, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is still, unfortunately, rather relevant, as things haven’t changed all that much, but Capra’s dependence on over-the-top melodrama has worn thin. It’s a good film, but it’s no longer a great one. Just in time for election day, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is screening November 3 at 11:00 am as part of the Film Forum Jr. series for kids and families, which continues November 10 with Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr., November 17 with Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant, and, appropriately enough during Thanksgiving week, George Seaton’s original 1947 Miracle on 34th Street.

FILM FORUM JR.: BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN

The Monster (Boris Karloff) is getting ready to meet his mate in FRANKENSTEIN sequel

BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (James Whale, 1935)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Sunday, October 27, $7, 11:00 am
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org

At the start of James Whale’s Frankenstein, actor Edward Van Sloan, who plays Dr. Waldman in the film, steps out from behind a curtain and tells the audience that what they are about to see “is one of the strangest tales ever told. It deals with the two great mysteries of creation; life and death. I think it will thrill you. It may shock you. It might even horrify you. So, if any of you feel that you do not care to subject your nerves to such a strain, now’s your chance to uh, well — we warned you!” Instead of staying away, people flocked to the theaters, making Frankenstein such a hit that Universal produced a sequel, although it took longer than expected. At the beginning of Whale’s 1935 follow-up, Bride of Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Elsa Lanchester) tells Percy Bysshe Shelley (Douglas Walton) and Lord Byron (Gavin Gordon), “The publishers did not see that my purpose was to write a moral lesson, the punishment that befell a mortal man who dared to emulate god,” letting them know that there was more to her story, picking up where the first movie left off. The Monster (Boris Karloff again, billed only by his last name) has survived the fire, and he is on the loose. Dr. Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive, reprising his role as the godlike creator) has survived as well and is ready to finally marry his sweetheart, Elizabeth (Valerie Hobson, taking over for an ill Mae Clarke).

The Bride (Elsa Lanchester) has a few things to say about her resurrection in Whale sequel

But their plans are interrupted by the arrival of the extremely strange and menacing Dr. Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger), who thinks that the Monster deserves a mate. Meanwhile, the Monster is traipsing through the woods, finding a friend in a blind violin-playing hermit (O. P. Heggie) and learning how to speak as he tries to avoid capture by the determined Burgomaster (E. E. Clive). Whale, who initially did not want to direct the sequel, has a ball with the film, infusing it with religious imagery, including having the Monster lifted up on a cross in a graveyard, and campy humor, particularly when Dr. Pretorius shows off his collection of rather silly miniature creatures to Dr. Frankenstein. Karloff, who was billed above the title, takes the Monster to another level, achieving sympathy as he learns more about what he is and comes to understand such feelings as longing and loneliness. Una O’Connor is a hoot as the loudmouth Minnie, practically serving as a one-woman Greek chorus. The scene in which the Monster waits for and then meets his mate (Lanchester, who is listed in the credits only as Mary Shelley) is a genuine cinema classic, layered with depth and meaning. While the first film was, and still is, shocking and horrifying, just as Van Sloan warned, the second is actually stranger, more satisfying, and, at its heart, more human. Interestingly, Bride of Frankenstein, which experienced various types of censorship back in the mid-1930s, is screening on October 27 at 11:00 am as part of the Film Forum Jr. series for kids and families and will be preceded by Ub Iwerks’s 1937 cartoon Skeleton Frolics for Halloween week; the series continues November 3 with Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, appropriately during election week, and later will show George Seaton’s 1947 Miracle on 34th Street on the Sunday before Thanksgiving.

THE SQUARE

Ahmed Hassan fights for a better future for Egypt in THE SQUARE

THE SQUARE (AL MIDAN) (Jehane Noujaim, 2013)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
October 25 – November 13
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
www.thesquarefilm.com

“During the early days, we agreed to stay united no matter what,” Ahmed Hassan tells those around him in Jehane Noujaim’s powerful and important documentary The Square. “When we were united, we brought down the dictator. How do we succeed now? We succeed by uniting once again.” But Ahmed, one of several Egyptian revolutionaries who Noujaim follows for two years in the film, finds that it is not that easy to bring everyone together, as the government leaders continue to change and factions develop that favor the military and the Muslim Brotherhood. Putting her own life in danger, Noujaim (The Control Room, Startup.com) is right in the middle of it all as she shares the stories of Ahmed, a young man who is determined to see the revolution through until peace and justice prevail; Magdy Ashour, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who must choose between his own personal beliefs and that of his power-hungry organization; and Khalid Abdalla, the British-Egyptian star of The Kite Runner and United 93 who becomes an activist like his father, serving as the revolution’s main link to the international community through the media and by posting videos. In The Square, a 2013 New York Film Festival selection, Noujaim also introduces viewers to human rights lawyer Ragia Omran, protest singer Ramy Essam, and filmmaker Aida El Kashef, none of whom are willing to give in even as the violence increases.

Massive crowds of Egyptians occupy Tahrir Square to demand freedom and democracy in THE SQUARE

Documentary offers an inside look at the occupation of Tahrir Square by Egyptians demanding freedom and democracy

In the documentary, Noujaim includes footage of televised political speeches and interviews that contradict what is actually happening in Tahrir Square as elections near. Reminiscent of Stefano Savona’s Tahrir: Liberation Square, which played at the 2011 New York Film Festival, The Square makes the audience feel like it’s in Tahrir Square, rooting for the revolutionaries to gain the freedom and democracy they so covet. The film also features several stunning shots of the massive crowds, most memorably as thousands of men kneel down in unison to pray to Mecca. Among its many strengths, The Square personalizes the revolution in such a way as to reveal that a small group of people can indeed make a difference, although sometimes they just have to keep on fighting and fighting and fighting. The Square opens October 25 at Film Forum, with Noujaim, Abdalla, and producer Karim Amer participating in Q&As following the 7:50 shows on October 25 and 26 and the 3:20 show on October 27.

Academy Award Nomination: Best Documentary Feature

CAMILLE CLAUDEL 1915

Juliette Binoche stars as sculptor and mental patient Camille Claudel in heartbreaking film

CAMILLE CLAUDEL 1915 (Bruno Dumont, 2013)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
October 16-29
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
www.kinolorber.com

Juliette Binoche gives a gut-wrenching performance as the traumatized title character in Bruno Dumont’s heartbreaking Camille Claudel 1915. The film takes place over the course of several days in 1915, as the sculptor and former mistress of Auguste Rodin awaits a visit from her younger brother, poet, devout Christian, and diplomat Paul Claudel. Camille has been moved to an asylum in Montdevergues, where she prepares her own meals for fear of being poisoned on orders from Rodin, who she believes is still trying to ruin her life and career twenty years after their personal and professional relationships ended. Run by nuns, the asylum is home primarily to deeply disturbed women incapable of taking care of themselves and barely able to speak coherent sentences. Claudel, a loner who was committed by her family shortly after the death of her father, desperately wants to be released and get her life back, but everything seems to be poised against her. Binoche, her pale face appearing to have been chiseled like one of Claudel’s sculptures, plays Camille with a subtle yet stern beauty, giving several long, impassioned speeches that writer-director Dumont (Twentynine Palms, L’humanité) and cinematographer Guillaume Deffontaines shoot in single takes, the camera remaining still, Camille framed like a painting. Throughout the film, Camille is seen amid mostly blacks, grays, browns, and whites, a monochromatic color scheme that echoes her work. The film has a cinéma vérité feel, as much of the sparse dialogue is improvised, many of the nuns are nurses at the asylum, and several of the patients are actually committed there, lending a neo-Realist quality to the austere setting. The film, which is “freely adapted from” Paul’s writings and letters, Camille’s letters, and medical records, is not a biopic; instead, it’s a fascinating study of a talented artist and the mental anguish that ultimately overwhelmed her.

AFTER TILLER

Dr. Susan Robinson has to make difficult choices when deciding whether to perform a late abortion

AFTER TILLER (Martha Shane & Lana Wilson, 2013)
Film Forum, 209 West Houston St., 212-727-8110
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 212-875-5600
Opens Friday, September 20
www.aftertillermovie.com

In After Tiller, directors and producers Martha Shane and Lana Wilson manage to humanize one of the most contentious, controversial, and complicated issues of our age: late abortion. In May 2009, Dr. George Tiller, who specialized in third-trimester abortions, was assassinated in front of his clinic in Wichita, Kansas. That left only four doctors in the United States who performed late abortions, each of whom had either trained or worked with Dr. Tiller. “It was absolutely no question in any of our minds that we were going to keep on doing his work,” one of those four doctors, Susan Robinson, says in the film. As After Tiller begins, Dr. Robinson works with Dr. Shelley Sella at Southwestern Women’s Options in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Dr. LeRoy Carhart is a former U.S. Air Force colonel who operates the Abortion & Contraception Clinic of Nebraska, and Dr. Warren Hern is director of the Boulder Abortion Clinic in Colorado. Shane and Wilson follow these four dedicated doctors who continue doing their work despite the personal danger associated with their profession, including harassment, murder, assault, and bombings. “When I walk out the door, I expect to be assassinated,” Dr. Hern says. The filmmakers show the doctors in their offices, meeting with women who are requesting late abortions for various reasons; Shane and Wilson also follow the abortion providers into their homes as they go on with their daily lives, offering an intimate portrait of these men and women who are so often called monsters but are firm in their belief that what they are doing is important and absolutely necessary, performing their jobs with care and understanding. However, Dr. Hern wonders if he should stop providing late abortions and just settle down peacefully with his new wife and adopted son, while Dr. Carhart and his wife opt to move out of Nebraska after a law change and meet resistance as they try to move their clinic to Maryland or Virginia.

Dr. Warren Hern is one of only four doctors in America who provides late abortions

The film also reveals that deciding to perform a late abortion is often an extremely difficult choice for the doctors as well as the patients and not something the providers do automatically when a woman comes to them. One of the most compelling scenes occurs when Drs. Sella and Robinson have a heart-wrenching disagreement over whether to proceed with a late abortion for a young woman, evaluating whether her reason is valid enough and lamenting that the ability of the woman to tell her story could affect the final decision. It’s a pivotal moment that also brings into focus the concerns of the American people; while less than one percent of the abortions performed in the country occur in the third trimester, the procedure is often the centerpiece of the antiabortion movement, but even pro-choice supporters will find themselves questioning the efficacy of all late abortions. The women come to the doctors for many reasons, ranging from the health of the child to economic situations to admitting that they either didn’t know or refused to accept that they were pregnant until it was too late. “It’s guilt no matter which way you go,” one desperate patient, whose child would be born with severe disabilities and would likely die within a year, tells Dr. Sella. “Guilt if you go ahead and do what we’re doing, or bring him into this world and then he doesn’t have any quality of life.” Although Shane and Wilson include footage of protestors, news reports, and congressional hearings, After Tiller is a powerful, deeply emotional documentary about the doctors and patients who must make impossible choices and live with their decisions for the rest of their lives. The film, which raises fascinating, difficult questions for which there are no easy answers, opens September 20 at Film Forum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Shane (Bi the Way) and Wilson will be at Film Forum on September 20-21 at the 8:10 screenings and September 22 at 4:30 to discuss the film; they will also participate in a series of Q&As at Lincoln Center, including September 20 at 7:00 with NARAL Pro-Choice New York, September 21 at 7:00 with the New York Abortion Access Fund, September 22 at 3:00 with Nancy Northup of the Center for Reproductive Rights, and September 26 at 7:00 with Dr. Sara Miller of the Reproductive Health Access Project, in addition to a panel discussion on September 23 at 7:00 with Kassi Underwood of Exhale.