Tag Archives: MoMA

AN AUTEURIST HISTORY OF FILM REPRISE: THE LIFE OF OHARU

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

THE LIFE OF OHARU (SAIKAKU ICHIDAI ONNA) (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1952)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Tuesday, September 3, 4:30
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.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. 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 September 3 at 4:30 as part of MoMA’s “An Auteurist History of Film Reprise,” which gives film enthusiasts a second chance to catch works that have previously been shown at MoMA at earlier hours in the day, when many people cannot see them.

A VIEW FROM THE VAULTS — WARNER BROS. TODAY: THE TOWN

Claire (Rebecca Hall) and Doug (Ben Affleck) have a complicated relationship in THE TOWN

THE TOWN (Ben Affleck, 2010)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Friday, July 19, 7:30, and Monday, August 5, 6:30
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.thetownmovie.warnerbros.com

Ben Affleck, who displayed great skill as a director in his debut feature, 2007’s Gone Baby Gone, did it again with his follow-up, the romantic thriller The Town. Affleck, who also cowrote the script, stars as Doug MacRay, the leader of a small group of bank robbers in tough Charlestown, Massachusetts, the bank robbery capital of America. As the film opens, the thieves are just hitting a bank and are forced to take a hostage, manager Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall). After later letting her go unharmed, they soon realize that she lives in their neighborhood and might be able to recognize one of them, so Doug starts hanging around her, pretending to be interested in her so he can tap her for information. Meanwhile, Boston cop Dino (Titus Welliver) and FBI Special Agent Frawley (Jon Hamm) are getting closer to the gang, who continue to pull off daring heists regardless of the heat on them. Although there are a handful of plot holes you could drive an armored truck through, The Town ends up being a compelling action film and love story, with car chases, massive shootouts, and a tender relationship as Doug begins to fall for Claire, and vice versa, even though the truth threatens to blow everything apart. Also threatening to blow everything apart is Doug’s right-hand man, Jem (Jeremy Renner, channeling James Cagney in White Heat), who likes hurting and killing way too much. Affleck, who as a director allows his actors a large amount of freedom, has gotten fine performances across the board; the cast also includes Pete Postlethwaite as an underworld florist, Chris Cooper as Doug’s long-incarcerated father, Blake Lively as a drug-dealing tramp, and Boston rapper Slaine, who contributed songs to the soundtrack as well. The film, based on the Chuck Hogan novel Prince of Thieves, also benefits from Affleck’s genuine affection for the place where he grew up, shooting on location and setting the finale in a world-famous landmark. It’s been fascinating watching Affleck come of age in public, from his early days acting in such films as School Ties, Mall Rats, and Dazed and Confused to his wildly successful directing career, with his third film, Argo, being named Best Picture at this year’s Oscars. The Town is screening July 19 and August 5 as part of the MoMA series “A View from the Vaults: Warner Bros. Today,” consisting of thirty-one films from the last twenty years of movies coming out of the famed studio, including the Harry Potter, Dark Knight, and Lord of the Ring series as well as such wide-ranging fare as Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, Ted Braun’s Darfur Now, Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows, Todd Phillips’s The Hangover, and Zack Snyder’s Watchmen.

MoMA FREE TUESDAYS IN MAY

Visitors can now see such works as Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” at MoMA seven days a week, with the first one hundred visitors getting in free every Tuesday in May (photo courtesy MoMA / Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest)

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Tuesday, May 7, 14, 21, 28, 10:30 am – 5:30 pm
Free admission for the first one hundred visitors
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

Every Friday afternoon, there is a long line at the Museum of Modern Art, when admission is free from 4:00 to 8:00. Meanwhile, on Tuesdays, stray people gather at the entrances, frantically searching their guidebooks to confirm that the museum is actually closed on that day. That latter situation is about to change, as MoMA has just announced that they now will be open seven days a week, with Tuesday hours, 10:30 am – 5:30 pm, that match the rest of the week except Friday, which is of course open later. MoMA is actually getting the jump on the Met, which earlier announced that it will also open its doors every day, adding Monday to its schedule, but that begins in July. To celebrate the new policy, MoMA will be offering free admission Tuesdays in May to the first one hundred visitors, an ample savings of $25 per adult, $18 per senior, and $14 per student. (Children sixteen and under who are not part of a group are always free.) Among the many exhibitions currently on view are “Claes Oldenburg: The Street and the Store” and “Claes Oldenburg: Mouse Museum / Ray Gun Wing,” “Artist’s Choice: Trisha Donnelly,” “Wait, Later This Will Be Nothing: Editions by Dieter Roth,” “Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light,” “9 + 1 Ways of Being Political: 50 Years of Political Stances in Architecture and Urban Design,” “Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light,” and “Hand Signals: Digits, Fists, and Talons.” It’s first come, first served, so you better start lining up soon to take advantage of this temporary offer.

THE FILMS OF STANLEY KUBRICK: FEAR AND DESIRE

Stanley Kubrick’s first film, FEAR AND DESIRE, is screening at IFC retrospective

FEAR AND DESIRE (Stanley Kubrick, 1953)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
March 20-25
Series runs March 20-28
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

The IFC Center is preparing for the March 29 theatrical release of Rodney Ascher’s documentary Room 237, which delves into metamysteries surrounding Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, with the terrific series “The Films of Stanley Kubrick,” screening every one of the Bronx-born ex-pat’s feature works, most of which are being projected in DCP. Kubrick’s 1953 seldom-seen psychological war drama, Fear and Desire, will be shown March 20-25 in high definition. His first full-length film, made when he was twenty-four, Fear and Desire is a curious tale about four soldiers (Steve Coit, Kenneth Harp, Paul Mazursky, and Frank Silvera) trapped six miles behind enemy lines. When they are spotted by a local woman (Virginia Leith), they decide to capture her and tie her up, but leaving Sidney (Mazursky) behind to keep an eye on her turns out to be a bad idea. Meanwhile, they discover a nearby house that has been occupied by the enemy and argue over whether to attack or retreat. Written by Howard Sackler, who was a high school classmate of Kubrick’s in the Bronx and would later win the Pulitzer Prize for The Great White Hope, and directed, edited, and photographed by the man who would go on to make such war epics as Paths of Glory, Full Metal Jacket, and Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Fear and Desire features stilted dialogue, much of which is spoken off-camera and feels like it was dubbed in later. Many of the cuts are jumpy and much of the framing amateurish. Kubrick was ultimately disappointed with the film and wanted it pulled from circulation; instead it was preserved by Eastman House in 1989 and restored twenty years later, which is good news for film lovers, as it is fascinating to watch Kubrick learning as the film continues. His exploration of the psyche of the American soldier is the heart and soul of this compelling black-and-white war drama that is worth seeing for more than just historical reasons. “There is a war in this forest. Not a war that has been fought, nor one that will be, but any war,” narrator David Allen explains at the beginning of the film. “And the enemies who struggle here do not exist unless we call them into being. This forest then, and all that happens now, is outside history. Only the unchanging shapes of fear and doubt and death are from our world. These soldiers that you see keep our language and our time but have no other country but the mind.” Fear and Desire lays the groundwork for much of what is to follow in Kubrick’s remarkable career, all of which can be seen March 20-28 at IFC.

EIKO & KOMA: THE CARAVAN PROJECT

Eiko and Koma will be performing THE CARAVAN PROJECT through January 21 at MoMA (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

PERFORMING HISTORIES: LIVE ARTWORKS EXAMINING THE PAST
Museum of Modern Art, Agnes Gund Garden Lobby
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through January 21
Museum admission: $25 ($12 can be applied to the purchase of a film ticket within thirty days)
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.eikoandkoma.org

Although Eiko & Koma refer to their 1999 work, The Caravan Project, as “a vehicle for art activism,” it does not seek to make any comments on political or social issues. Instead, it was created to help promote art, particularly bringing it to those who either don’t have access to it or don’t know much about it. Reconfigured as part of their ongoing Retrospective Project, the 2012 version of Caravan has pulled into the MoMA lobby in front of Rodin’s “Monument to Balzac,” where the New York-based Japanese couple are performing during all hours the museum is open, through January 21. Placed right by the entrance, it forces people to see it on their way into MoMA as well as on their way out, so even if visitors intend to make a beeline straight for a specific exhibit, it is hard to miss an unhooked trailer that opens on all four sides, with a man and a woman either inside it or walking around outside, wearing decrepit white material that seems to be molting off their bodies as they move ever so slowly. It also can be seen without having to pay the $25 admission charge, furthering the dancers’ desire to bring the project to people who might not be able to afford hefty museum fees.

Koma emerges from the trailer and takes a slow walk in MoMA lobby (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Koma emerges from trailer and takes slow walk in MoMA lobby (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Held in conjunction with the “Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde” show, the “Art Theater Guild and Japanese Underground Cinema, 1960–1986” film series, and the “Performing Histories: Live Artworks Examining the Past” exhibition, The Caravan Project is for the first time being presented indoors without the Jeep that drives them to the site at the beginning and takes them away at the end. Instead, Eiko and Koma have become one with the museum, much as their work throughout the years has seen them merge with the natural environment, either real or constructed, in works such as Naked and Water. With The Caravan Project, at times they’ll be playing to a large crowd surrounding the trailer, where visitors are allowed to get within three feet of them, while at other moments there might be no one watching, just museumgoers passing by without even glancing their way, but that is all part of this compelling living installation. The trailer itself is filled with bare tree branches and beehive-like detritus above and below, with Eiko and Koma, in all white, emerging in between as if coming out of cocoons following an apocalyptic nightmare. Spiderwebs are wrapped around their faces, making it appear that they’ve been dormant for a long time before rising again. Their Butoh-like movements are painstakingly slow; it is electrifying when they actually touch each other, appearing to be so desperately in need of human contact in this barren, desolate scene, the only sound coming from the crowd itself. “Performing Histories” continues through May 25 with such upcoming programs as Kelly Nipper’s Tessa Pattern Takes a Picture, Fabian Barba’s A Mary Wigman Dance Evening, and El Arakawa’s Paris & Wizard: The Musical.

QUAY BROTHERS: ON DECIPHERING THE PHARMACIST’S PRESCRIPTION FOR LIP-READING PUPPETS

Career retrospective offers a dazzling look into the surreal world of the Brothers Quay (still from STREET OF CROCODILES, 1986)

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday–Monday through January 7
Museum admission: $22.50 ($12 can be applied to the purchase of a film ticket within thirty days)
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

When MoMA Film associate curator Ron Magliozzi first approached twins Stephen and Timothy Quay about putting together a career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, the brothers weren’t sure why people would be interested in delving into their history and working process, but they opened their London studio to Magliozzi and helped design the appropriately strange and wonderful exhibit “On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets.” Similar in concept to the “Tim Burton” blockbuster a few years back, the Quay Brothers show is filled with paintings and drawings, film and video, early self-portraiture, photographs, collages, book and album covers, etchings, engravings, commercials, and other fascinating paraphernalia associated with their rather eclectic career, spread across several floors. Born in rural Pennsylvania in 1947 to a machinist father and homemaker mother, the Quays were heavily influenced by illustrator and naturalist Rudolf Freund, whom they met in the late 1960s; Polish poster art from the 1960s, which they saw in a 1967 exhibition at the Philadelphia College of Art; and avant-garde, experimental shorts by Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk.

Quay Brothers, detail, “O Inevitable Fatum, Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, décor,” wood, fabric, glass, metal, 1987 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The MoMA show is set up like a labyrinth, with treats around every corner, from oil snowscapes done when the brothers were still in single digits to short films made when they were in school, from the creepy Black Drawings of the mid-1970s and stage designs for opera, theater, and dance by Béla Bartók, Eugene Ionesco, Molière, Sergei Prokofiev, Georges Feydeau, E. T. A. Hoffman, and others to their British television documentaries, made with longtime producer Keith Griffiths and including the absolutely insane documentary Igor, the Paris Years Chez Pleyel, in which paper cut-outs of Bolshevik poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, French writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, and Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky hang out and do rather odd things in Paris. All of these works lend intrigue and insight to the primary sections of the exhibition, dedicated to the marvelous short films the Quays are renowned for, dark, dazzling stop-motion animations with puppets that relate mesmerizing tales set in a mysterious world of dreams and nightmares that delve into the subconscious. The Quay Brothers’ breakthrough came in 1986 with Street of Crocodiles, adapted from a Bruno Schulz short story, starring eyeless puppets with open heads and taking place in a Kinetoscope, featuring themes and elements that appear in many of their films, including machines, thread, scissors, repetitive movement, screws, bones, metal shavings, and aching, experimental music. Getting its own room, the film is followed by a two-minute outtake that has never been shown before. Among the many other classic Brothers Quay shorts on view in the galleries are In Absentia, The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer, Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, The Sandman, and the dazzling color films This Unnameable Little Broom and The Comb (from the Museums of Sleep). Downstairs outside the Titus Theaters is “Dormitorium,” a terrific collection, previously seen at Parsons the New School for Design in 2009, of film décors, glass-enclosed sets from many of the above-mentioned films as well as many others. And on the first floor by the up escalator you can find “Coffin of a Servant’s Journey,” a short film inside a coffin that can be watched by only one person at a time.

Quay Brothers, “Quay Brothers self-portrait,” photographic enlargement (Atelier Koninck QbfZ)

“On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets” is a magical trip inside the bizarre, surreal world of the Quay Brothers, an exhibition that was a long time coming and has been handled splendidly. It’s also an exhibition that requires a lot of time to be properly enjoyed, so don’t rush through it or you’ll miss so many of its myriad hidden treasures. And as far as the title itself goes, we’ll leave that to the Quays to describe themselves, as they do in the catalog in a faux interview with sixteenth-century composer Heinrich Holtzmüller: “In our mind it’s more of a teasing inducement for a journey. Not a grand journey but a tiny one . . . around the circumference of an apple. We’re no doubt gently abusing the anticipation that the prescriptive side is courting both a rational illegibility as well as an irrational legibility. Hopefully the intrigued will engage with the ambiguity. And besides, the prescription is only mildly inscrutable and one certainly won’t die from it, considering that thousands of people a year reportedly die from misread prescriptions.” You were expecting anything different?

(MoMA will be screening the Quay Brothers’ latest full-length film, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, on January 6-7 in Titus Theater 1, with a live musical score performed by Mikhail Rudy. Also on January 7, “The Essential Shorts, Part 2” will screen six shorts in the Education and Research Building, including Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, Nocturna Artificialia, Ex Voto, This Unnameable Little Broom: Epic of Gilgamesh, Maska, and Bartók Béla: Sonata for Solo Violin.)

THE CLOCK

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday–Monday through January 21
Museum admission: $25 ($12 can be applied to the purchase of a film ticket within thirty days)
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

In 2010, the Whitney presented “Festival,” a thrilling interactive retrospective of the work of Christian Marclay, featuring multiple site-specific installations and live performances. The New York-based multidisciplinary artist followed that up with a supreme work of utter brilliance, the captivating twenty-four-hour video The Clock, which was initially shown at Chelsea’s Paula Cooper Gallery in early 2011 and reprised at the David Rubenstein Atrium as part of the Lincoln Center Festival this past summer. The sensational examination of time is now back for another run in the city, at MoMA through January 21. Screened in a large, dark gallery with three rows of roomy, comfortable couches in the Contemporary Galleries on the second floor, the film unfolds in real time, composed of thousands of clips from movies and television that feature all kinds of clocks and watches showing the minutes ticking away, as well as verbal mentions of the time. Masterfully edited so that it creates its own fluid narrative, The Clock seamlessly cuts from romantic comedies with birds emerging from cuckoo clocks to action films in which protagonists synchronize their watches, from thrillers with characters battling it out in clock towers to dramas with convicted murderers facing execution and sci-fi programs with mad masterminds attempting to freeze time. Marclay mixes in iconic images with excerpts from little-known foreign works, so audiences are kept on the edge of their seats, wondering what will come next, laughing knowingly at recognizable scenes and gawking at strange, unfamiliar bits.

A MoMA visitor wonders just how much longer he’ll have to wait to get in to see Christian Marclay’s THE CLOCK (© Christian Marclay)

Part of the beauty of The Clock is that while time is often central to many of the clips, it is merely incidental in others, someone casually checking their watch or a clock visible in the background, emphasizing how pervasive time is — both on-screen and in real life. Americans spend an enormous amount of time watching movies and television, so The Clock is also a wry though loving commentary on what we choose to do with our leisure time. Although it is not necessarily meant to be viewed in one massive gulp, The Clock will be shown in its entirety January 4-6, 11-14, and 18-20, beginning at 10:30 am Friday and continuing through 5:30 Sunday. Since the film corresponds to the actual time, midnight should offer some fascinating moments, although you might be surprised by just how exciting even three o’clock in the morning can be. But expect huge crowds whenever you go — capacity is 170 (130 sitting, 40 standing, first-come, first-served, and you can stay as long as you want) — so be prepared to do something with all that valuable time spent on line. But wait you should — it’s well worth every second.