Tag Archives: Francesca Beale Theater

NYFF56 SPOTLIGHT ON DOCUMENTARY: CARMINE STREET GUITARS

Rick Kelly and Cindy Hulej are a mutual admiration society in Carmine Street Guitars

NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL: CARMINE STREET GUITARS (Ron Mann, 2018)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Saturday, October 6, Walter Reade Theater, 4:15
Monday, October 8, Francesca Beale Theater, 2:30
Festival runs through October 14
212-875-5610
www.filmlinc.org

In the second half of Ron Mann’s utterly delightful and unique documentary Carmine Street Guitars, a well-dressed, well-groomed young man enters the title store in Greenwich Village and identifies himself as Adam Shalom, a Realtor who is selling the building next door. Shalom tries to talk about square footage, but Carmine Street Guitars founder and owner Rick Kelly barely looks up as he continues cleaning a fret. It’s a critical, uncomfortable moment in an otherwise intimate and inviting film; throughout the rest of the eighty-minute documentary, the soft-spoken Kelly talks guitars and craftsmanship with a stream of very cool musicians and his punk-looking young apprentice, Cindy Hulej. But Shalom’s arrival harkens to one of the main reasons why Mann made the movie: to capture one of the last remaining old-time shops in a changing neighborhood, a former bohemian paradise that has been taken over by hipsters and corporate culture, by upscale stores and restaurants and luxury apartments. You’ll actually cheer that Kelly gives Shalom such short shrift, but you’ll also realize that Shalom and others might be knocking again at that door all too soon.

Rick Kelly welcomes “instigator” Jim Jarmusch to his Greenwich Village shop in Carmine Street Guitars

The rest of the film is an absolute treat. Mann follows five days in the life of Carmine Street Guitars; each day begins with a static shot of the store from across the street, emphasizing it as part of a community as people walk by or Kelly, who was born in Bay Shore, arrives with a piece of wood he’s scavenged. The camera then moves indoors to show Kelly and Hulej making guitars by hand, using old, outdated tools and wood primarily from local buildings that date back to the nineteenth century. Kelly doesn’t do computers and doesn’t own a cell phone; he leaves all that to Hulej, who posts pictures of new six-strings on Instagram. Meanwhile, Kelly’s ninetysomething mother, Dorothy, works in the back of the crazily cluttered store, taking care of the books with an ancient adding machine. Over the course of the week, they are visited by such musicians as Dallas and Travis Good of the Sadies (who composed the film’s soundtrack), “Captain” Kirk Douglas of the Roots, Eleanor Friedberger, Dave Hill of Valley Lodge, Jamie Hince of the Kills, Nels Cline of Wilco, Christine Bougie of Bahamas, Marc Ribot, and Charlie Sexton. Bill Frisell plays an impromptu surf-guitar instrumental version of the Beach Boys’ “Surfer Girl.” Stewart Hurwood, Lou Reed’s longtime guitar tech, talks about using Reed’s guitars for the ongoing “DRONES” live installation. “It’s like playing a piece of New York,” Lenny Kaye says about the guitars made from local wood while also referring to the shop as part of the “real village.”

Mann, the Canadian director of such previous nonfiction films as Grass, Know Your Mushrooms, and Comic Book Confidential, was inspired to make the movie at the suggestion of his friend Jarmusch, who in addition to directing such works as Stranger Than Paradise (which featured Balint), Down by Law, and 2016 NYFF selection Paterson is in the New York band Sqürl. Plus, it was Jarmusch who first got Kelly interested in crafting his guitars with wood from buildings, “the bones of old New York,” resulting in Telecaster-based six-strings infused with the history of Chumley’s, McSorley’s, the Chelsea Hotel, and other city landmarks. Carmine Street Guitars, which is far more than just mere guitar porn, is screening in the Spotlight on Documentary section of the New York Film Festival on October 6 and 8, with Mann participating in Q&As after each show, joined by special guests, including Kelly and Hulej on October 6. The film will be preceded by the world premiere of eighty-seven-year-old Manfred Kirchheimer’s thirty-nine-minute Dream of a City, a collage of 16mm black-and-white images of construction sites and street scenes taken between 1958 and 1960, set to music by Shostakovich and Debussy. Kirchheimer (Stations of the Elevated) will also be at both Q&As as well as the October 6 free NYFF Docs Talk with Alexis Bloom, James Longley, Mark Bozek, and Tom Surgal, moderated by Lesli Klainberg.

LOVE, CECIL

Documentary reveals Sir Cecil Beaton to be an ambitious dandy with many talents (courtesy of the Cecil Beaton Studio Archives at Sotheby’s)

LOVE, CECIL (Lisa Immordino Vreeland, 2017)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Francesca Beale Theater
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Aves.
Opens Friday, June 29
212-875-5600
www.filmlinc.org
zeitgeistfilms.com

Love, Cecil is a refreshing, invigorating documentary about Oscar- and Tony-winning fashion and war photographer, diarist, production designer, painter, portraitist, costume designer, illustrator, and one of the most influential dandies of the twentieth century, Sir Cecil Beaton. Writer-director Lisa Immordino Vreeland has followed up her first two feature-length films, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, and Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict — she is Diana Vreeland’s granddaughter-in-law — with another behind-the-scenes journey into the art world and high society, this time explored through the lens of Beaton, who was on a neverending quest to find beauty and success in every part of his life and career. “I started out with very little talent, but I was so tormented with ambition. Once you’ve started for the end of the rainbow, you can’t very well turn back,” he wrote in one of his numerous published diaries, quotes from which are read in voiceover by Rupert Everett throughout the film. The rather self-effacing Beaton, who was born in Hampstead in 1904, was never satisfied, always wanting more. “I exposed thousands of rolls of film, wrote hundreds of thousands of words, in a futile attempt to preserve the fleeting moment,” Everett narrates.

Cecil Beaton catches up on some news in fab documentary, Love, Cecil (courtesy of the Cecil Beaton Studio Archives at Sotheby’s)

A member of Britain’s aristocratic Bright Young Things in the 1920s, Beaton went on to photograph such celebrities as Marilyn Monroe, Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, Judy Garland, Sugar Ray Robinson, Mick Jagger, and, perhaps most prominently, Queen Elizabeth and the royal family — and he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind about some of his subjects and acquaintances, saving his finest vitriol for Evelyn Waugh, Noël Coward, Katharine Hepburn, and Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. He was taken with patrons Stephen Tennant and Peter Watson, artist and designer Oliver Messel, Olympic fencer Kin Hoitsma, and Greta Garbo, some of whom became his lovers. His tempestuous relationship with Garbo is one of the highlights of the film. Vreeland, cinematographer Shane Sigler, and editor Bernadine Colish maintain a slow, witty, stylish pace, matching Beaton’s general comportment. In addition to home movies, personal photographs, newspaper articles, and archival footage of Beaton on talk shows, the film includes new, revealing interviews with designer Isaac Mizrahi, actors Leslie Caron and Peter Eyre, Vogue international editor at large Hamish Bowles, auctioneer and historian Philippe Garner, model and writer Penelope Tree, Beaton’s sisters Nancy Lady Smiley and Baba Hambro, former museum director Sir Roy Strong, designer Manolo Blahnik, dance critic Alastair Macaulay, interior designer Nicky Haslam, artist David Hockney, and Beaton’s longtime butler, Ray Gurton. There’s a wonderful scene with Diana Vreeland and Truman Capote, and photographer David Bailey gives fabulous insight into his 1971 film, Beaton by Bailey, which Beaton was not very fond of. “There is scarcely a flattering self-portrait, yet truth begins with oneself,” Everett recites from a diary.

“His life was a stage,” notes biographer Hugo Vickers, while photographer Tim Walker explains, “He had a relationship with the idea of the person, not actually the person. There’s truth in fantasy.” Beaton, who redefined fashion layouts while working at Vogue and Vanity Fair, likely would feel right at home in today’s world of selfies and social media, where everyone can create and flaunt their fame. Beaton won four Tonys and three Oscars (including Best Costume Design for the original Broadway production of My Fair Lady and Best Costume Design and Best Art Direction for the movie) and is shown to be both vain and insecure, proud and melancholic, because of and despite his success. Vreeland often cuts to calming shots of Ashcombe House and Reddish House, where Beaton found peace in his garden and with his beloved cat, away from all the hubbub of high society. A splendidly dandy doc, Love, Cecil opens June 29 at the Francesca Beale Theater at Lincoln Center, with Vreeland participating in Q&As after the 7:15 show on June 29 and the 1:15 screening on June 30 (with Sigler) and introducing the 9:45 show on June 29 and the 3:30 screening on June 30.

SUMMER 1993

Paula Robles and Laia Artigas give superb performances in Carla Simón’s award-winning Summer 1993

SUMMER 1993 (Carla Simón, 2017)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, Francesca Beale Theater
144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Opens Friday, May 25
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org
summer1993.oscilloscope.net

Named Best First Feature at the 2017 Berlinale, Summer 1993, Carla Simón’s autobiographical full-length debut, is an exquisite, deeply involving tale about an extraordinary young girl facing a new life after both her parents die of AIDS. Six-year-old Frida (Laia Artigas) must move from Barcelona to La Garrotxa in the Catalan countryside, where she will live with her uncle Esteve (David Verdaguer), her mother’s brother; his wife, Marga (Bruna Cusí); and their four-year-old daughter, Anna (Paula Robles). Unsurprisingly, Frida has a difficult time adjusting. When she plays with other kids and skins her knee, a scared mother whisks away her child immediately, afraid of the virus. Frida begins acting out, first in small ways, then in bigger ones, taking advantage of her cousin Anna’s caring, innocent nature. She somewhat relaxes when her grandparents (Fermí Reixach and Isabel Rocatti) and other friends and relatives visit, including Lola (Montse Sanz), Angela (Berta Pipo), Irene (Etna Campillo), and Cesca (Paula Blanco), but going back to Barcelona is not an option. Esteve keeps giving his niece the benefit of the doubt while Marga grows more and more worried about Frida’s behavior, which becomes more complex and dangerous, especially toward Anna. All the while, Frida feigns innocence, until even she realizes she may be taking things too far.

Esteve (David Verdaguer) and Marga’s (Bruna Cusí) life changes when their niece comes to live with them in Summer 1993

Summer 1993 plays out like an intricate, intellectual horror film, reminiscent of such genre classics as Robert Mulligan’s The Other, Mervyn LeRoy’s The Bad Seed, and even Richard Donner’s The Omen, though without any supernatural elements. Frida is not inherently evil, but from the minute she tells Anna not to touch her doll collection, it is clear she is teetering on the brink. Artigas, who was cast after Simón had interviewed nearly one thousand other children, is absolutely riveting as Frida, in complete control of her complicated character, her knowing eyes revealing wisdom well beyond her years. Cinematographer Santiago Racaj’s camera adores Artigas, exploring her face and expertly revealing her point of view. Accompanied by a lovely, emotive score, the camera is almost always in motion, sometimes just the slightest bit, representing Frida’s slightly askew, on-edge world. Robles is a charmer as Anna, seemingly too young to know what she is doing as an actress yet physically and emotionally right on target. Cusí excels as Marga, who is suspicious of Frida early on but understands that she is a girl in the midst of terrible grief, in desperate need of real connection to deal with her loss. Writer-director Simón uses water as a threat throughout the film, the pure, fresh liquid, from a bathtub to a swimming pool to a forest stream, a counterpart to the diseased blood that might have been passed down to Frida from her parents. At its core, Summer 1993 is a wise, heartfelt drama about the fears of both adults and children as they try to find their place in an ever-shifting world that can be as cold and cruel as it can be warm and loving.

LIFE IS A DREAM — THE FILMS OF RAÚL RUIZ: NIGHT ACROSS THE STREET

Raúl Ruiz’s final film, Night Across the Street, is an abstract, surreal examination of time and memory

THE NIGHT ACROSS THE STREET (LA NOCHE DE ENFRENTE) (Raúl Ruiz, 2012)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center: Francesca Beale Theater, Howard Gilman Theater
144 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Sunday, February 11, 8:00; Sunday, February 18, 6:15
Series runs February 9-18
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org

In December 2016, the Film Society of Lincoln Center held the first of its two-part tribute to Chilean-French auteur Raúl Ruiz, a prolific writer and director who passed away in 2011 at the age of seventy. “Life Is a Dream: The Films of Raúl Ruiz” is now back for the second half of the celebration, from February 9 to 18, consisting of fourteen more works by Ruiz, highlighted by a week-long run of a new digital restoration of his 1999 magnum opus, Time Regained, a dramatization of Marcel Proust on his deathbed, thinking back on his own life as well as the fictional life of his characters. The festival also includes Ruiz’s last film, Night Across the Street, which proves to be a fitting finale for Ruiz, who left behind a legacy of more than one hundred movies and one hundred plays. An adaptation — or as Ruiz explained it, “adoption” — from a pair of short stories by Imaginist writer Hernán del Solar, Night Across the Street follows the odd meanderings of Don Celso (Sergio Hernandez), an old man about to retire from his office job. Past, present, and future, the real and the imagined, merge in abstract, surreal ways as Don Celso goes back to his childhood, where he (played as a boy by Santiago Figueroa) takes his idol, Beethoven (Sergio Schmied), to the movies and gets life lessons from Long John Silver (Pedro Villagra). As an adult, he hangs out with the fictional version of French teacher and writer Jean Giono (Christian Vadim), whose real self and family appear to be elsewhere. And he visits a haunted hotel run by Nigilda (Valentina Vargad) where he believes he will meet his doom.

Memories and hallucinations mingle in front of obviously fake backgrounds, strange, unexplained characters appear then disappear, and Don Celso (and Ruiz, of course) has fun with such words as “Antofagasta” and “rhododendron” in a film that Ruiz created to be shown only after his death. (He made the film after being diagnosed with liver cancer, which he survived by getting a transplant, only to die shortly thereafter of a lung infection.) And at the center of it all is one of Ruiz’s favorite themes, time — Don Celso is regularly interrupted by an annoying alarm clock that signals him to take unidentified medication, keeping him alive even as the end beckons. Screening at Lincoln Center on February 11 and 18 (the first show will be introduced by actress Chamila Rodríguez), Night Across the Street is an elegiac swan song by a master filmmaker. The series continues with such other Ruiz films as Klimt, starring John Malkovich as the Austrian artist, the American thriller Shattered Image, with Anne Parillaud and William Baldwin, the deeply personal improvised Dutch film On Top of the Whale, and the haunting Comedy of Innocence, with Isabelle Huppert and Jeanne Balibar.

EMOTION PICTURES: INTERNATIONAL MELODRAMAS

Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman star in Douglas Sirk’s gorgeous Technicolor emotional melodrama All That Heaven Allows

ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS (Douglas Sirk, 1955)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater, Francesca Beale Theater
144/165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Wednesday, December 13, 6:30
Monday, January 1, 7:00
Series runs December 13 – January 6
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.org

Forget about It’s a Wonderful Life, Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street, and endless versions of A Christmas Carol; our favorite holiday movie is Douglas Sirk’s sensationally strange and beautiful All That Heaven Allows, which you can see December 13 and January 1 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s four-week, fifty-four-movie, get-out-your-handkerchiefs series “Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama.” Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman, who played characters who fell in love in Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession, are at it again in All That Heaven Allows. This time around, Hudson is Ron Kirby, a softhearted, hunky gardener who prefers a simple, outdoorsy life yet is drawn to Cary Scott (Wyman), an older widow who is firmly entrenched in her community’s country-club lifestyle with her best friend, Sara (Agnes Moorehead). Kirby and Cary begin a passionate affair but when they decide to wed, the snooty members of the town’s social register are thoroughly appalled and do everything in their power to drive them apart because of class, wealth, and age differences. (At thirty-seven, Wyman was a mere eight years older than Hudson in real life.) Meanwhile, Cary’s kids, high schooler Kay (Gloria Talbott) and college student Ned (William Reynolds), find their mother’s impending marriage to Kirby disgusting and distasteful as well, preferring she marry Harvey (Conrad Nagel), a plain, sexless widower. In 1950s America, women were still subservient to the needs of men and to raising their children, not permitted by society to lead their own lives and make decisions for themselves, especially when it came to their sexuality. The film features an essentially nonreligious belief system that is embodied by Kirby, who is inspired by the writings on naturalism and the true meaning of success espoused by Henry David Thoreau in Walden. Indeed, the outside world is central to the film; Sirk and his longtime cinematographer, Russell Metty, let the camera linger on trees, lakes, snow banks, and deer. Flowers abound indoors and out, and windows always look out on beautiful scenery, as if paintings, accompanied by Frank Skinner’s equally lush score and Bill Thomas’s colorful costumes.

It all makes for the kind of candy-coated America that David Lynch turned upside down and inside out in Blue Velvet and that directly influenced Todd Haynes’s 2002 Sirk homage, Far from Heaven, in which white Connecticut housewife Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore), who is married to a closeted white executive (Dennis Quaid), becomes perhaps too friendly with her black gardener (Dennis Haysbert), a melding of All That Heaven Allows and Sirk’s Imitation of Life. (Both Far from Heaven and Imitation of Life are part of the series as well.) At one point, Kirby talks about how his best friend learned to be his own man. “And you want me to be a man,” Cary says. “Only in that one way,” Kirby responds, playfully looking over at Cary; it’s as if Hudson is teasing her about his real-life sexuality. People’s double nature is reflected throughout, as Sirk and Metty use fireplace screens, windshields, mirrors, and even a television set to create physical separation between characters as well as the inner and outer parts of the same character. In addition, there is a vast array of ties, cravats, scarves, ascots, bow ties, and other articles of clothing that everyone wears around their necks, as if their true feelings are always being choked and hidden. It’s a magnificent film, richly textured and multilayered, not nearly as cynical and tongue-in-cheek as some claim it to be. All That Heaven Allows is screening December 13 and January 1 in “Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama,” which divides its films into four categories: Silent Screen, Hollywood’s Golden Age, International Classics, and Modern/Postmodern Drama, with works by Yasujirô Ozu, Martin Scorsese, Pier-Paolo Pasolini, Charlie Chaplin, Pedro Almodóvar, Clint Eastwood, Federico Fellini, Youssef Chahine, David Lean, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Vincente Minnelli, Max Ophüls, and many more.

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

THE CRANES ARE FLYING (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957)
Sunday, December 17, 4:00
Saturday, December 30, 3:30
www.filmlinc.org

Even at a mere ninety-seven minutes, Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying 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. You can see it December 17 and 30 in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama,” which also features works by D. W. Griffith, F. W. Murnau, Oscar Micheaux, Nicholas Ray, George Cukor, Ida Lupino, Leo McCarey, Ritwik Ghatak, Mikio Naruse, Jacques Demy, Lars von Trier, Guy Maddin, and many more.

Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka) lives a life filled with misery after misery in Mizoguchi melodrama

THE LIFE OF OHARU (SAIKAKU ICHIDAI ONNA) (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1952)
Monday, December 18, 1:30
Saturday, January 6, 3:45
www.filmlinc.org

We used to think that Aki Kaurismäki’s The Match Factory Girl was the saddest film ever made about a young woman who just can’t catch a break, as misery after misery keeps piling up on her ever-more-pathetic existence. But the Finnish black comedy has nothing on Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Life of Oharu, a searing, brutal example of the Buddhist observation of impermanence and the role of women in Japanese society. The film, based on a seventeenth-century novel by Ihara Saikaku, is told in flashback, with Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka) recounting what led her to become a fifty-year-old prostitute nobody wants. It all starts to go downhill after she falls in love with Katsunosuke (Toshirô Mifune), a lowly page beneath her family’s station. The affair brings shame to her mother (Tsukie Matsuura) and father (Ichiro Sugai), as well as exile. The family is redeemed when Oharu is chosen to be the concubine of Lord Matsudaira (Toshiaki Konoe) in order to give birth to his heir, but Lady Matsudaira (Hisako Yamane) wants her gone once the baby is born, and so she is sent home again, without the money her father was sure would come to them.

Donald Richie called THE LIFE OF OHARU “one of Mizoguchi’s most elegantly beautiful films”

Mizoguchi’s The Life of Oharu is an elegant film about one woman’s struggle to survive in a cold world

Over the next several years, Oharu becomes involved in a series of personal and financial relationships, each one beginning with at least some hope and promise for a better future but always ending in tragedy. Nevertheless, she keeps on going, despite setback after setback, bearing terrible burdens while never giving up. Mizoguchi (Sansho the Bailiff, The 47 Ronin, Street of Shame) bathes much of the film in darkness and shadow, casting an eerie glow over the unrelentingly melodramatic narrative. Tanaka, who appeared in fifteen of Mizoguchi’s films and also became the second Japanese woman director (Love Letter, Love Under the Crucifix), gives a subtly compelling performance as Oharu, one of the most tragic figures in the history of cinema. Winner of the International Prize at the 1952 Venice International Film Festival, The Life of Oharu is screening December 18 and January 6 in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama,” which also features works Teuvo Tulio, Fei Mu, George Kuchar, Todd Haynes, Wong Kar Wai, Terence Davies, Leos Carax, Wu Yonggang, Robert Stevenson, and many more.

Letty Mason (Lillian Gish) is being driven crazy by internal and external sources in The Wind

THE WIND (Victor Sjöström, 1928)
December 19, 8:30
www.filmlinc.org

Victor Sjöström’s 1928 now-classic silent film The Wind stars Lillian Gish as Letty Mason, a young woman traveling from Virginia to Texas to live with her cousin Beverly (Edward Earle). Traveling from the cultured, civilized East to what was still the wild West, the uncertain Letty must confront the fierceness of nature head-on — both human nature and the harsh natural environment. On the train, she is wooed by cattleman Wirt Roddy (Montagu Love), but her fears grow as she first sees the vicious wind howling outside the train window the closer she gets to her destination. Once in Sweetwater, she is picked up by her cousin’s neighbors, the handsome Lige Hightower (Lars Hanson), and his goofy sidekick, Sourdough (William Orlamond). Both men take a quick liking to Letty, who seems most attracted to Wirt. Soon Beverly’s wife, Cora (Dorothy Cumming, in her next-to-last film before retiring), becomes jealous of Letty’s closeness with her husband and kids and kicks her out, leaving a desperate Letty to make choices she might not be ready for as the wind outside becomes fiercer and ever-more dangerous. The Wind is a tour de force for Gish in her last silent movie, not only because of her emotionally gripping portrayal of Letty but because she put the entire production together, obtaining the rights to the novel by Dorothy Scarborough, hiring the Swedish director and star Hanson, and arguing over the ending with the producers and Irving Thalberg. (Unfortunately, she lost on that account, just about the only thing that did not go the way she wanted.)

Letty Mason (Lillian Gish) and Lige Hightower (Lars Hanson) have some tough decisions to make in Victor Sjöström’s silent classic

Sjöström (The Phantom Carriage, The Divine Woman), who played Professor Isak Borg in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, and cinematographer John Arnold create some dazzling effects as a twister threatens and Letty battles both inside and outside; she is regularly shot from the side, at the door of the shack where she lives, not knowing if she’d be safer inside or outside as the wind and sand blast over her. The film, an early look at climate change, was shot in the Mojave Desert in difficult circumstances; to get the wind to swirl, the crew used propellers from eight airplanes. Dialogue is sparse, and the story is told primarily in taut visuals. A restored 35mm print of The Wind with the original music and effects soundtrack is screening December 19 in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Emotion Pictures: International Melodrama.”

THE NON-ACTOR: PUTTY HILL

Matt Porterfield directs the cast in a scene from PUTTY HILL

Matt Porterfield directs a cast of mostly nonprofessional actors in a scene from Putty Hill

PUTTY HILL (Matt Porterfield, 2010)
Film Society of Lincoln Center
Francesca Beale Theater
144 West 65th St. at Amsterdam Ave.
Thursday, December 7, 6:30
Series runs November 24 – December 10
212-875-5601
www.filmlinc.org

The city of Baltimore has not exactly been depicted kindly in film and on television, with such series as Homicide: Life on the Street, The Wire, and The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood focusing on the rash of drugs and violence that have devastated the community, while native son John Waters has shown its wackier side in such films as Polyester and Hairspray. Born and raised in a suburb just inside the Baltimore city line, writer-director Matt Porterfield (Hamilton, I Used to Be Darker) has taken a different view in his second feature film, Putty Hill. When financing for his coming-of-age drama Metal Gods fell through, he decided to keep the cast and crew together and instead shoot a cinéma verité story about the after-effects of a young man’s drug overdose on a tight-knit community inspired by the one he grew up in. Not much is revealed about Cory as his funeral nears and life goes on, with his younger brother, Cody (Cody Ray), playing paintball with Cory’s friends; his uncle, Spike (Charles Sauers), tattooing customers in his apartment; and Spike’s daughter, Jenny (Sky Ferreira), returning to her hometown for the first time in several years and hanging out with her old friends like nothing much has changed. Working off a five-page treatment with only one line of scripted dialogue, Porterfield and cinematographer Jeremy Saulnier capture people just going on living, taking Cory’s death in stride; Porterfield interviews much of the cast, who share their thoughts and feelings in relatively unemotional ways. Shot on a minuscule budget in only twelve days, Putty Hill uses natural sound and light, nonprofessional actors, and real locations, enhancing its documentary-like feel, maintaining its understated narrative and avoiding any bombastic or sudden, big revelations. It’s a softly moving film, a tender tale about daily life in a contemporary American working-class neighborhood. Putty Hill is screening December 7 at 6:30 in the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “The Non-Actor”; it will be introduced by Porterfield and preceded by Laida Lertxundi’s Cry When It Happens. The series continues through December 10 with such other films as Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World, Susumu Hani’s Furyo shonen, Spencer Williams’s The Blood of Jesus, and Peter Watkins’s Punishment Park.

NYFF55 SPOTLIGHT ON DOCUMENTARY: VOYEUR

Gerald Foos and Gay Talese discuss voyeurism and journalistic ethics in eye-opening documentary

VOYEUR (Myles Kane & Josh Koury, 2017)
New York Film Festival, Film Society of Lincoln Center
Sunday, October 15, Francesca Beale Theater, $15, 9:00
Festival runs September 28 – October 15
212-875-5601
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“I’m a natural person to write about a voyeur because I’m a voyeur myself,” award-winning, bestselling journalist Gay Talese says in Myles Kane and Josh Koury’s Voyeur, which is getting a bonus screening at the New York Film Festival on October 15 prior to debuting on Netflix on December 1. The documentary makes a voyeur of the viewer as well as it follows the thirty-five-year journalistic relationship and offbeat friendship between Talese, longtime New York Times and Esquire writer and author of such books as Honor Thy Father and Thy Neighbor’s Wife, and Gerald Foos, the owner of a Colorado motel who claims he spent decades spying on people from a special crawl space he built above the rooms. In January 1980, Foos, owner of the Manor House Motel, wrote a letter to Talese, offering him a story about what he was doing; Foos considered himself a researcher, not a pervert or a peeping Tom. Using archival footage, news reports, and new interviews, Kane and Koury follow Foos, his second wife, Anita, and Talese as the journalist prepares to write a major piece for the New Yorker in advance of the release of his latest book, The Voyeur’s Motel. New Yorker articles editor Susan Morrison considers Foos a disturbed sociopath in need of attention, while Grove/Atlantic senior editor Jamison Stoltz and publisher Morgan Entrekin have their doubts about the veracity of Foos’s eerily specific tale. So as questions arise about key facts and Talese’s professional ethics, Foos wonders if he should have remained silent — “I’m used to private spaces, places that nobody could see me and I could see them,” he explains — and an angry Talese faces a potentially tarnished legacy.

Gerald Foos turned the Manor House Motel in Colorado into a research facility where he spied on couples having sex

Kane and Koury, who previously collaborated on such documentaries as Journey to Planet X, We Are Wizards, and We Will Live Again, often use a model of the Manor House to depict certain events while also re-creating scenes of Foos watching couples having sex — including one time when Talese joins him in the snooping and experiences a wardrobe malfunction. (Kane and Koury also let the camera lovingly follow Talese as he impeccably dresses himself, every detail crucial to his overall appearance, much like a journalist getting every single fact right.) Over the years, Talese and the Fooses developed a unique kind of bond that is unusual for a writer and his subject, but the erudite Talese, now eighty-five, defends his actions. “My life has pretty much been living through other people’s experiences and to be a very accurate chronicle, an observer, watching other people, listening,” he says. “I take my time, and I am genuinely interested in the people I am writing about because there’s something about them that I feel I can identify with.” It is fascinating to watch the reactions of Foos and Talese as the article comes out, the book is published, and all hell breaks loose. Voyeur raises significant issues about truth in journalism, the writer’s ethical responsibilities, and the lure of salaciousness. Early on, Talese, in his writing bunker filled with decades and decades of carefully organized files — in a way similar to the collections of baseball cards and other objects Foos keeps in his basement — says, “The story never ends. Stories never die. A lot of reporters think when they leave a story, it’s all over. Sometimes it’s just beginning.” Kane and Koury stick with the story and end up with quite a tale, something that is not about to die anytime soon.