Tag Archives: film forum

SHITAMACHI: TALES OF DOWNTOWN TOKYO

Yasuki Chiba’s Shitamachi is part of Film Forum series focusing on the popular downtown area of Tokyo

Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Series runs October 18 – November 2
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

Tokyo’s downtown area known as Shitamachi, which means “low town,” has been a popular setting for movies since cinema began. Southeast of the Imperial Palace, it consists of small neighborhoods going back to the Edo period, filled with traditional Japanese culture particularly for the lower classes. You can explore its many facets in the Film Forum series “Shitamachi: Tales of Downtown Tokyo,” twenty-five films that take place in the geographical area seemingly invented for the movies. Running October 18 to November 7, the festival features a wide range of films, from Yasujirô Ozu’s Record of a Tenement Gentleman and Shôhei Imamura’s Eijanaika to Sadao Yamanaka’s Humanity and Paper Balloons and Nobuhiko Ôbayashi’s Reason, from Kenji Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame and Nami Iguchi’s The Cat Leaves Home to Takeshi Kitano’s Kikujiro and Ishirô Honda’s Godzilla. The series is copresented with the Japan Foundation and programmed by Aiko Masubuchi, who will introduce screenings of Tadashi Imai’s Still I Live On and Satsuo Yamamoto’s The Street without Sun, while Steve Sterner will play live piano accompaniment to Ozu’s Woman of Tokyo. Japanese master Akira Kurosawa was drawn to Shitamachi for several of his tales about class struggle, and Film Forum will be showing four of them, highlighted below.

Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune star in Kurosawa noir DRUNKEN ANGEL

Takashi Shimura and Toshirô Mifune star in Akira Kurosawa noir Drunken Angel

DRUNKEN ANGEL (Akira Kurosawa, 1948)
Friday, October 18, 12:30, 4:50
Saturday, October 19, 5:10, 9:40
Wednesday, October 23, 4:20, 10:15
Friday, November 1, 9:30
filmforum.org

The first film that Akira Kurosawa had total control over, Drunken Angel tells the story of a young Yakuza member, Matsunaga (Toshirô Mifune), who shows up late one night at the office of the neighborhood doctor, Sanada (Takashi Shimura), to have a bullet removed from his hand. Sanada, an expert on tuberculosis, immediately diagnoses Matsunaga with the disease, but the gangster is too proud to admit there is anything wrong with him. Sanada sees a lot of himself in the young man, remembering a time when his life was full of choices — he could have been a gangster or a successful big-city doctor. When Okada (Reisaburo Yamamoto) returns from prison, searching for Sanada’s nurse, Miyo (Chieko Nakakita), the film turns into a classic noir, with marvelous touches of German expressionism thrown in. The terrible incidental music lapses into melodramatic mush, preventing the film from reaching its full potential greatness, but that’s just a minor quibble.

Takashi Shimura and Toshirō Mifune team up as detectives tracking a stolen gun in Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog

STRAY DOG (野良犬) (NORA INU) (Akira Kurosawa, 1949)
Friday, October 18, 2:30, 8:20
Saturday, October 19, 1:20, 7:10
Thursday, October 24, 12:30, 9:45
filmforum.org

Akira Kurosawa’s thrilling police procedural, Stray Dog, is one of the all-time-great film noirs. When newbie detective Murakami (Toshirō Mifune) gets his Colt lifted on a trolley, he fears he’ll be fired if he does not get it back. But as he searches for the weapon, he discovers that it is being used in a series of robberies and murders — for which he feels responsible. Teamed with seasoned veteran Sato (Takashi Shimura), Murakami risks his career — and his life — as he tries desperately to track down his gun before it is used again. Kurosawa makes audiences sweat, showing postwar Japan in the midst of a brutal heat wave, with Murakami, Sato, dancer Harumi Namiki (Keiko Awaji), and others constantly mopping their brows — the heat is so palpable, you can practically see it dripping off the screen. (You’ll find yourself feeling relieved when Sato hits a button on a desk fan, causing it to turn toward his face.) In his third of sixteen films made with Kurosawa, Mifune plays Murakami with a stalwart vulnerability, working beautifully with Shimura’s cool, calm cop who has seen it all and knows how to handle just about every situation. (Shimura was another Kurosawa favorite, appearing in twenty-one of his films.)

Rookie detective Murakami (Toshirō Mifune) often finds himself in the shadows in STRAY DOG

Mifune is often seen through horizontal or vertical gates, bars, curtains, shadows, window frames, and wire, as if he’s psychologically and physically caged in by his dilemma — and as time goes on, the similarities between him and the murderer grow until they’re almost one and the same person, dealing ever-so-slightly differently with the wake of the destruction wrought on Japan in WWII. Inspired by the novels of Georges Simenon and Jules Dassin’s The Naked City, Stray Dog is a dark, intense drama shot in creepy black and white by Asakazu Nakai and featuring a jazzy soundtrack by Fumio Hayasaka that unfortunately grows melodramatic in a few key moments — and oh, if only that final scene had been left on the cutting-room floor. It also includes an early look at Japanese professional baseball. Kurosawa would soon become the most famous Japanese auteur in the world, going on to make Rashomon, Ikiru, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, The Bad Sleep Well, The Lower Depths, and I Live in Fear in the next decade alone.

Takashi Shimura does a stellar job with a rare leading role in Kurosawa’s captivating melodrama IKIRU

Takashi Shimura does a stellar job with a rare leading role in Akira Kurosawa’s captivating melodrama Ikiru

IKIRU (TO LIVE) (DOOMED) (Akira Kurosawa, 1952)
Sunday, October 20, 1:20
Thursday, October 24, 4:50
filmforum.org

In Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 gem, Ikiru, winner of a special prize at the 1954 Berlin International Film Festival, the great Takashi Shimura is outstanding as simple-minded petty bureaucrat Kanji Watanabe, a paper-pushing section chief who has not taken a day off in thirty years. But when he suddenly finds out that he is dying of stomach cancer, he finally decides that there might be more to life than he thought after meeting up with an oddball novelist (Yunosuke Ito). While his son, Mitsuo (Nobuo Kaneko), and coworkers wonder just what is going on with him — he has chosen not to tell anyone about his illness — he begins cavorting with Kimura (Shinichi Himori), a young woman filled with a zest for life. Although the plot sounds somewhat predictable, Kurosawa’s intuitive direction, a smart script (cowritten with Hideo Oguni), and a marvelously slow-paced performance by Shimura (Stray Dog, Scandal, Seven Samurai) make this one of the director’s best melodramas.

The Lower Depths is another masterful tour de force from Akira Kurosawa

THE LOWER DEPTHS (DONZOKO) (Akira Kurosawa, 1957)
Saturday, November 2, 12:50, 8:40
filmforum.org

Loosely adapted from Maxim Gorky’s social realist play, The Lower Depths is a staggering achievement, yet another masterpiece from Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa. Set in an immensely dark and dingy ramshackle skid-row tenement during the Edo period, the claustrophobic film examines the rich and the poor, gambling and prostitution, life and death, and everything in between through the eyes of impoverished characters who have nothing. The motley crew includes the suspicious landlord, Rokubei (Ganjiro Nakamura), and his much younger wife, Osugi (Isuzu Yamada); Osugi’s sister, Okayo (Kyôko Kagawa); the thief Sutekichi (Toshirō Mifune), who gets involved in a love triangle with a noir murder angle; and Kahei (Bokuzen Hidari), an elderly newcomer who might be more than just a grandfatherly observer. Despite the brutal conditions they live in, the inhabitants soldier on, some dreaming of their better past, others still hoping for a promising future. Kurosawa infuses the gripping film with a wry sense of humor, not allowing anyone to wallow away in self-pity. The play had previously been turned into a film in 1936 by Jean Renoir, starring Jean Gabin as the thief.

JAY MYSELF

Photographer Jay Maisel goes through decades of stuff as he moves out of longtime East Village home in Jay Myself

JAY MYSELF (Stephen Wilkes, 2018)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Wednesday, July 31
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

In 1966, Brooklyn-born photographer Jay Maisel moved into the 1898 Germania Bank Building on the corner of Bowery and Spring, purchased with a now astonishing $25,000 down payment. Nearly fifty years later, in early 2015, after decades of taking pictures and collecting tens of thousands of random items, he was forced to sell the graffiti-laden, six-floor, 36,000-square-foot property because of rising maintenance costs; at fifty-five million dollars, it was the largest private real estate deal in New York history. One of his protégés, Stephen Wilkes — who back in the 1970s knocked on Maisel’s door and showed him his portfolio — documents Maisel’s months-long exit from the landmark building as he and a team of assistants sift through the maelstrom and Maisel regales him with stories from his career, which has included shooting for advertising agencies, Sports Illustrated, New York magazine, and jazz legends. “Objects are there for you only if you really see them. If you don’t, they don’t exist. And a lot of people don’t see things,” Maisel philosophizes. “Before you’re going to be able to see, you have to look. And before you can look, you have to want to look. And art is, to some effect, trying to make others see what you see.”

Documentary follows Jay Maisel’s nearly fifty-year history in the Bank on Spring & Bowery

Maisel, a calm man with a penchant for littering his sentences with curses, leads Wilkes through the six floors, showing items from his vast collection, one that borders on hoarding. “Each floor represented a certain partition of his mind,” Wilkes explains. Wilkes speaks with such other photographers as Jeff Dunas, Duane Michals, Dan Winters, Peter Murphy, Matt Dean, Hale Gurland, Barbara Bordnick, Jamie Smith, and Melchior DiGiacomo, who rave about Maisel’s influence and his iconoclastic personality. “He sees all this potential in things that no one else would. He just has such a sense of play,” his daughter, Amanda, says. Maisel, who carries a camera everywhere he goes, constantly snapping pictures, adds, “What I’m trying to do all the time is to try and see things anew, to see things the way a child would see them.”

The quintessentially New York documentary doesn’t dig too deep into his personal life and tends to be overly worshipful, but Maisel, who turned eighty-eight earlier this year, is an engaging character, chomping on a cigar, telling of his studies at Yale with Josef Albers, and going through boxes and boxes (and boxes and boxes) of stuff — what many would call junk — that he refuses to part with as the team from Moishe’s is faced with a virtually impossible situation. “I think there’s a delight in the perception and the enjoyments of objects,” he notes. There’s also a delight and enjoyment in watching this mensch over the course of seventy-eight minutes. Jay Myself opens at Film Forum on July 31, with Maisel and Wilkes participating in Q&As at several shows from July 31 to August 4.

BURT LANCASTER: ROBERT SIODMAK’S THE KILLERS / DON SIEGEL’S THE KILLERS

Burt Lancaster makes a killer film debut in classic 1946 noir from Robert Siodmak

THE KILLERS (Robert Siodmak, 1946)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
July 19–25
Series runs July 19 – August 15
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

In 1950, Edmond O’Brien starred as auditor Frank Bigelow in Rudolph Maté’s classic noir D.O.A., a story told in flashback as Bigelow tries to figure out why someone has poisoned him. Four years earlier, O’Brien dealt with another kind of fatalism in Robert Siodmak’s The Killers, playing insurance agent Jim Reardon, who is investigating why a gas station attendant was brutally gunned down in his bed in suburban Brentwood, New Jersey. The film — which kicks off Film Forum’s four-week salute to Manhattan-born Hollywood star Burt Lancaster on July 19 in a new 4K restoration — opens with cold-hearted contract killers Al (Charles McGraw) and Max (William Conrad) arriving in town, looking for the Swede (Lancaster), aka Pete Lund and Ole Andreson. They waltz into Henry’s Diner, giving orders and exchanging mean-spirited dialogue with no fears or worries. When Nick Adams (Phil Brown) warns the Swede that the men are coming to kill him, the former boxer knows there’s nothing he can do about it anymore; he’s tired of running, and he’s ready to meet his end.

It’s a shocking way to begin a movie; up to that point, it’s a faithful version of Ernest Hemingway’s short story, but the rest is the splendid invention of writers Richard Brooks, Anthony Veiller, and John Huston and producer Mark Hellinger. Reardon soon finds himself meeting with a series of gangsters as they relate, through flashbacks, a plot to rob a payroll, perpetrated by a motley crew that includes “Dum Dum” Clarke (Jack Lambert), “Blinky” Franklin (Jeff Corey), the Swede, and mastermind Big Jim Colfax (Albert Dekker), along with Big Jim’s gun moll, femme fatale extraordinaire Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner). Reardon’s boss (Donald MacBride) wants him to forget about it, since it’s essentially about a meager $2,500 insurance claim, but Reardon is determined to find out what happened to a quarter million in cash, with the help of the Swede’s childhood friend, Lt. Sam Lubinsky (Sam Levene).

Ava Gardner turns more than a few heads in The Killers

The Killers is an intense, passionate heist flick, structured like Citizen Kane, starting with a death and then putting everything together via interviews and flashbacks. Lancaster and Gardner are magnetic, he in his screen debut, she in the film that made her a star. Siodmak (The Dark Mirror, The Spiral Staircase) masterfully navigates the noir tropes, from Miklós Rózsa’s jazzy score, which jumps out from the opening credits, and Woody Bredell’s oft-angled black-and-white cinematography that maintains an ominous, shadowy sensibility throughout to deft characterizations and surprising plot twists. As it makes its way through the seven deadly sins, The Killers lives up to its fab billing as a “Raw! Rugged! Ruthless drama of a man who gambled — his luck — his love — his life for the treachery of a girl’s lips.”

Nominated for four Oscars, for Best Director, Best Film Editing (Arthur Hilton), Best Music, and Best Adapted Screenplay, The Killers, which was also made into a 1958 student short by Andrei Tarkovsky and a 1964 crime drama by Don Siegel starring Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, John Cassavetes, Norman Fell, and Ronald Reagan, is screening July 19-25 at Film Forum; the Lancaster tribute continues through August 15 with such other Burt classics as Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success, Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity, and Louis Malle’s Atlantic City in addition to such lesser-known movies as John Cassavetes’s A Child Is Waiting, Sidney Pollack’s The Scalphunters, and Norman Foster’s Kiss the Blood Off My Hands.

The future’s not so bright, but Clu Gulager and Lee Marvin still have to wear shades in remake of The Killers

THE KILLERS (Don Siegel, 1964)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Saturday, July 20 – Monday, July 22
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

In conjunction with the screening of the 1946 version of The Killers kicking off Film Forum’s four-week Burt Lancaster festival, the downtown institution is also presenting Don Siegel’s 1964 remake July 20-22. Siegel, who at one point was supposed to direct the 1946 original, sets this adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 short story in a bright, candy-colored world that is a far cry from the intricate, shadowy darkness of Robert Siodmak’s earlier noir version; in fact, it’s so luminous that hitmen Charlie Strom (Lee Marvin) and Lee (Clu Gulager) are often wearing dark sunglasses (à la Jake and Ellwood Blues), and the film opens with them walking into a home for the blind, passing by two blind boys playing their own version of cops and robbers. The men are there to kill former race-car driver Johnny North (John Cassavetes), who is now a teacher. Despite being warned by an old man (longtime character actor Burt Mustin) that they are coming, Johnny waits for them, choosing not to run. His lack of a survival instinct confounds Charlie, who goes on a search to find out why Johnny didn’t fight for his life but instead essentially welcomed a brutal death.

Ronald Reagan plays a villain for the first time in his last movie, Don Siegel’s 1964 version of The Killers

Johnny’s sordid tale is related to Charlie and Lee in flashback as they meet up with his mechanic and best friend, Earl Sylvester (Claude Akins); Johnny’s lover, femme fatale Sheila Farr (Angie Dickinson); Farr’s other lover, crime boss Jack Browning (Ronald Reagan); and Jack’s flunky, Mickey Farmer (Norman Fell), as they tell a story of racing, double crosses, and a million-dollar heist. Written by Gene L. Coon and initially intended as a television movie but deemed too violent in the wake of the assassination of JFK and released theatrically, The Killers features plenty of cheesy scenes and none-too-subtle melodrama, but it’s still loads of fun, with a campy sense of humor lurking behind all the blood and guts, with a Rat Packy feel. Reagan is fun to watch in his final movie role before turning to politics — and his first time playing a villain — while the glamorous Dickinson shows off some fine hairdos and couture. Siegel, who had previously directed Invasion of the Body Snatchers and would go on to make Dirty Harry, Madigan, and Escape from Alcatraz, never veers off track as he relies on the great Lee Marvin, in the midst of a terrific run that included The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Cat Ballou, The Dirty Dozen, and Point Blank, to drive the action. It might not be very Hemingway-esque, but who cares?

THE CRANES ARE FLYING 2K RESTORATION

Sergey Urusevsky’s dazzling camera work is a character unto itself in The Cranes Are Flying

THE CRANES ARE FLYING (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, July 12
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

Even at a mere ninety-seven minutes, Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying, having a weeklong revival July 12-18 at Film Forum in a 2K restoration, is a sweeping Russian antiwar epic, an intimate and moving black-and-white tale of romance and betrayal during WWII. Veronika (Tatyana Samojlova) and Boris (Aleksey Batalov) are madly in love, swirling dizzyingly through the streets and up and down a winding staircase. But when Russia enters the war, Boris signs up and heads to the front, while Veronika is pursued by Boris’s cousin, Mark (Aleksandr Shvorin). Pining for word from Boris, Veronika works as a nurse at a hospital run by Boris’s father, Fyodor Ivanovich (Vasili Merkuryev), as the family, including Boris’s sister, Irina (Svetlana Kharitonova), looks askance at her relationship with Mark. The personal and political intrigue comes to a harrowing conclusion in a grand finale that for all its scale and scope gets to the very heart and soul of how the war affected the Soviet people on an individual, human level, in the family lives of women and children, lovers and cousins, husbands and wives.

Unforeseen circumstances trap Veronika (Tatyana Samojlova) in wartime Russia in Mikhail Kalatozov’s masterful The Cranes Are Flying

The only Russian film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes by itself, The Cranes Are Flying is a masterful work of art, a searing portrait of the horrors of war as seen through the eyes of one desperate woman. Adapting his own play, Viktor Rozov’s story sets up Boris and his family as a microcosm of Soviet society under Stalin; it’s no coincidence that the film was made only after the leader’s death. It’s a whirlwind piece of filmmaking, a marvelous collaboration between director Kalatozov, editor Mariya Timofeyeva (Ballad of a Soldier), composer Moisey Vaynberg (the opera The Passenger), and cinematographer Sergey Urusevsky, who also worked with Kalatozov on I Am Cuba and The Unsent Letter; Urusevsky’s camera, often handheld, is simply dazzling, whether moving through and above crowd scenes, closing in on Samojlova’s face and Batalov’s eyes, or twirling up at the sky. Poetic and lyrical, heartbreaking and maddening, The Cranes Are Flying is an exquisite example of the power of cinema.

TONI MORRISON: THE PIECES I AM

Toni Morrison discusses her life and career in The Pieces I Am (photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders)

TONI MORRISON: THE PIECES I AM (Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, 2019)
Film Forum, 209 West Houston St., 212-727-8110
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Francesca Beale Theater, 144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves., 212-875-5050
Opens Friday, June 21
www.tonimorrisonfilm.com

At the beginning of Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, artist Mickalene Thomas’s hands are seen putting together a collage of different images of author Toni Morrison, like a jigsaw puzzle, one on top of the other, to the sounds of Kathryn Bostic’s score. It’s a beautiful start to a beautiful film that takes viewers deep inside Morrison’s life and career, from daughter and student to teacher, wife, mother, editor, and award-winning novelist. “She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order,” Morrison writes in Beloved. In the film, Greenfield-Sanders, Morrison’s longtime friend and primary photographer of nearly forty years, and editor and researcher Johanna Giebelhaus gather the pieces that help paint a portrait of the extraordinary person that is Toni Morrison.

Toni Morrison and Timothy Greenfield-Sanders collaborate on new documentary (photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders)

They incorporate old interviews with Charlie Rose, Dick Cavett, and Bill Moyers, personal photographs, archival footage, and new interviews with Morrison and thirteen of her colleagues — among them Columbia University professor Farah Griffin, activist Angela Davis, New Yorker critic Hilton Als, Random House editor Robert Gottlieb, composer Richard Danielpour, media magnate Oprah Winfrey, and fellow authors Paula Giddings, Russell Banks, Fran Lebowitz, and Walter Mosley — who have nothing but laudatory things to say about her, as both a writer and a human being. The film also includes excerpts from several of Morrison’s books, read by Kim Cattrall, Joel Grey, S. Epatha Merkerson, Whoopi Goldberg, and others, in addition to works by such black artists as Kara Walker, Martin Puryear, Titus Kaphar, Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, David Hammons, Faith Ringgold, Romare Bearden, and Hank Willis Thomas that subtly complement her words.

The main focus, however, is on Morrison’s status as a black woman writer and her white audience. Early in her career, she was criticized for writing only about blacks and the black experience. “The assumption is the reader is a white person, and that troubled me. They were never talking to me,” Morrison says. “I didn’t want to speak for black people; I wanted to speak to, and to be among . . . us. So the first thing I had to do was to eliminate the white gaze.” One white gaze she has not eliminated is that of Greenfield-Sanders, who is Caucasian; in fact, Morrison is the one who inspired him to make such films as The Black List, The Latino List, The Women’s List, and The Trans List, which document people from diverse communities. (Morrison contributed an introduction to The Women’s List.)

Greenfield-Sanders focuses on such Morrison novels as Sula, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, and Beloved as well as the nonfiction compendium The Black Book. Cinematographer Graham Willoughby purposely shoots Morrison, who turned eighty-eight in February, straight on, with her looking directly into the camera, while the other subjects are photographed from the side, over the shoulder, adding further prestige and prominence to the grand dame, who is also shot on lovely mornings, working at her riverfront home.

Toni Morrison is seen hard at work in her riverfront home in The Pieces I Am (photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders)

Perhaps the best thing about this two-hour American Masters production is that after watching and listening to this remarkable woman talk about her approach to writing and the world at large, you’ll want to rush to reread her books, or pick them up for the first time. “Words have power,” she explains. Indeed they do. Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am opens June 21 at Film Forum and Lincoln Center; Greenfield-Sanders will participate in Q&As following the 7:20 show on June 21, the 12:20 show on June 22 (with Brigid Hughes), and the 2:40 show on June 23 at Film Forum and after the 3:30 and 6:20 shows on June 22 and the 1:00 show on June 23 at Lincoln Center.

UNZIPPED WITH ISAAC MIZRAHI IN PERSON

Isaac Mizrahi contemplates his future in UNZIPPED

Fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi contemplates his future in fab documentary, Unzipped

UNZIPPED (Douglas Keeve, 1995)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Thursday, June 13, 8:30
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
www.miramax.com

About halfway through Unzipped, Douglas Keeve’s thrilling 1995 documentary, which follows fashion designer extraordinaire Isaac Mizrahi as he puts together his fall 1994 collection following a critical disaster, Mizrahi says, “Everything’s frustrating; every single thing is frustrating. Except designing clothes. That’s not frustrating. That’s really liberating and beautiful. I don’t know, being overweight and not being able to lose weight, you know, that’s a problem. Anything you’re really working hard at and that’s not working, that’s a problem. But frankly, designing clothes is never a problem.” Of course, the statement doesn’t exactly ring true as Mizrahi, usually with his trademark bandanna wound around his wild, curly hair, encounters his fair share of difficulties as he meets with Candy Pratts and André Leon Talley from Vogue and Polly Mellen from Allure, expresses his hopes and fears with Mark Morris, Sandra Bernhard, Eartha Kitt, and his mother, and works with such supermodels as Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Shalom Harlow, Linda Evangelista, Carla Bruni, Christy Turlington, and Amber Valletta. Along the way he makes endless pop-culture references, singing the theme song from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, citing scenes from The Red Shoes, Marnie, Valley of the Dolls, and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and using Nanook of the North and The Call of the Wild as creative inspiration.

Mizrahi is a ball of neuroses throughout as he consults Ouija boards and Tarot cards to peek into his future and plays classical piano (Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” Debussy’s “Clair de Lune”) to calm himself down. “I’m not that stressed out,” he says. “I hate when people tell me I’m stressed out.” In his first film, director Keeve (Seamless, Hotel Gramercy Park), who was dating Mizrahi at the time, and Oscar-winning cinematographer Ellen Kuras (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Betrayal) switch from grainy black-and-white to color to sharp b&w as Mizrahi’s big show approaches, in which the major point of conflict is the designer’s desperate desire to use a scrim that will allow the high-powered audience to see the backlit silhouettes of the models as they change backstage, something not all the women, or his colleagues at Mizrahi & Co., are in favor of. The film opens with Mizrahi devastated by the reviews of his previous show and closes with him quietly examining the reviews for his fall collection; in between is a delightful look inside the crazy world of fashion. And then Mizrahi will have to do it all over again for the next season. Winner of the Audience Award at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival, Unzipped is having a special Pride Month screening at Film Forum on June 13 with Mizrahi present for a Q&A.

THE HOUR OF LIBERATION — DECOLONIZING CINEMA, 1966-1981: THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS

Members of the FLN hide from French paratroops in Gillo Pontecorvo’s neo-Realist classic The Battle of Algiers

THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
May 24-25, June 6-7, 11, 13
Series runs May 24 – June 13
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

Film Forum kicks off its impressive three-week series “The Hour of Liberation: Decolonizing Cinema, 1966-1981” with Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 masterpiece, The Battle of Algiers, one of the most important films about colonialism ever made. To lend additional insight, Elaine Mokhtefi, author of Algiers, Third World Capital: Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, Black Panthers, will participate in a Q&A following the 8:30 show on May 24, and cultural historian Kazembe Balagun will introduce the 9:20 screening on June 11. In Pontecorvo’s gripping neo-Realist war thriller, a reporter asks French paratroop commander Lt. Col. Mathieu (Jean Martin), who has been sent to the Casbah to derail the Algerian insurgency, about an article Jean-Paul Sartre had just written for a Paris paper. “Why are the Sartres always born on the other side?” Mathieu says. “Then you like Sartre?” the reporter responds. “No, but I like him even less as a foe,” Mathieu coolly answers. In 1961, French existentialist Sartre wrote in the preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, the seminal tome on colonialism and decolonialism, “In Algeria and Angola, Europeans are massacred at sight. It is the moment of the boomerang; it is the third phase of violence; it comes back on us, it strikes us, and we do not realize any more than we did the other times that it’s we that have launched it,” referring to European colonization.

“There are those among [the oppressed creatures] who assert themselves by throwing themselves barehanded against the guns; these are their heroes. Others make men of themselves by murdering Europeans, and these are shot down; brigands or martyrs, their agony exalts the terrified masses. Yes, terrified; at this fresh stage, colonial aggression turns inward in a current of terror among the natives. By this I do not only mean the fear that they experience when faced with our inexhaustible means of repression but also that which their own fury produces in them. They are cornered between our guns pointed at them and those terrifying compulsions, those desires for murder which spring from the depth of their spirits and which they do not always recognize; for at first it is not their violence, it is ours, which turns back on itself and rends them; and the first action of these oppressed creatures is to bury deep down that hidden anger which their and our moralities condemn and which is however only the last refuge of their humanity. Read Fanon: you will learn how, in the period of their helplessness, their mad impulse to murder is the expression of the natives’ collective unconscious.” Sartre’s brutally honest depiction of colonialism serves as a perfect introduction to Pontecorvo’s film, made five years later and then, unsurprisingly, banned in France. (In 1953, the Martinique-born Fanon, who fought for France in WWII, moved to Algeria, where he became a member of the National Liberation Front; French authorities expelled him from the country in 1957, but he kept working for the FLN and Algeria up to his death in 1961. For more on The Wretched of the Earth, see the documentary Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense.)

Terrorism and counterinsurgency take to the streets in Oscar-nominated The Battle of Algiers

In The Battle of Algiers, Pontecorvo (Kapò, Burn!) and screenwriter Franco Solinas follow a small group of FLN rebels, focusing on the young, unpredictable Ali la Pointe (Brahim Haggiag) and the more calm and experienced commander, El-hadi Jafar (Saadi Yacef, playing a character based on himself; the story was also inspired by his book Souvenirs de la Bataille d’Alger). Told in flashback, the film takes viewers from 1954 to 1957 as Mathieu hunts down the FLN leaders while the revolutionaries stage strikes, bomb public places, and assassinate French police. Shot in a black-and-white cinema-vérité style on location by Marcello Gatti — Pontecorvo primarily was a documentarian — The Battle of Algiers is a tense, powerful work that plays out like a thrilling procedural, touching on themes that are still relevant fifty years later, including torture, cultural racism, media manipulation, terrorism, and counterterrorism. It seems so much like a documentary — the only professional actor in the cast is Martin — that it’s hardly shocking that the film has been used as a primer for the IRA, the Black Panthers, the Pentagon, and military and paramilitary organizations on both sides of the colonialism issue, although Pontecorvo is clearly on the side of the Algerian rebels. However, it does come as a surprise that the original conception was a melodrama starring Paul Newman as a Western journalist.

All these years later, The Battle of Algiers, which earned three Oscar nominations (for Best Foreign Language Film in 1967 and Best Director and Best Original Screenplay in 1969), still has a torn-from-the-headlines urgency that makes it as potent as ever, and it looks better as well, having recently undergone a 4K restoration for its fiftieth anniversary. “The Hour of Liberation: Decolonizing Cinema, 1966-1981” runs May 24 – June 13 and includes such other political works as Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s Macunaíma, and Hai Ninh’s The Little Girl of Hanoi.