Tag Archives: walter reade theater

TITANUS — A FAMILY CHRONICLE OF ITALIAN CINEMA: BANDITS OF ORGOSOLO

Sardinian brothers Michele (Michele Cossu) and Peppeddu (Peppeddu Cuccu) are on the run from the law in Vittorio De Seta’s BANDITI A ORGOSOLO

BANDITI A ORGOSOLO (BANDITS OF ORGOSOLO) (Vittorio De Seta, 1961)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
144 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Saturday, May 23, 7:00
Festival runs May 22-31
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com

“The souls of these men are still primitive. What is right according to their law is not right according to that of the modern world,” an unseen narrator explains at the beginning of Vittorio De Seta’s sadly overlooked debut feature, Banditi a Orgosolo, about shepherds scraping to get by in a vast mountainous region of Sardinia. In the black-and-white post-neorealist film, Michele (Michele Cossu) and his young brother, Peppeddu (Peppeddu Cuccu), tend to their flock of sheep, for which Michele still owes money. After a trio of former shepherds turned bandits shows up, Michele is visited by the police; not wanting to get involved, he lies to the carbinieri, insisting he has not seen anyone else. A firefight ensues between the police and the bandits, leaving one cop dead, and Michele and Peppeddu are on the lam, hunted by the police while desperately trying to hold on to their flock as they make their way through what Michele refers to as “bad places.” Winner of the New Cinema Award at the 1961 Venice Film Festival, Banditi a Orgosolo is a dark, bleak tale, shot by De Seta in nearly infinite gradations of black and white, Valentino Bucchi’s ominous score lurking in the background. Cossu, a nonprofessional actor from the region, portrays Michele with a stark earnestness and a clear understanding of the futility of his character’s situation. A former documentarian, De Seta (The Uninvited, Lettere dal Sahara), who wrote the screenplay with Vera Gherarducci, doesn’t make any epic proclamations about society’s ills, instead letting the story about changing times and abject poverty in Sardinia unfold at an often agonizing snail’s pace. The shepherds and their small villages, representative of the old ways, are being left behind, even as the state takes the place of centuries-old oppressors, doing what it can to keep them down and destitute.

BANDITI A ORGOSOLO is set in the mountainous region of Sardinia

Banditi a Orgosolo is getting a rare screening on May 23 at 7:00 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Titanus: A Family Chronicle of Italian Cinema,” a ten-day, twenty-three-film retrospective honoring the Italian production company founded by Gustavo Lombardo in 1904 and later run by his son, Goffredo, and grandson, Guido, that remained active until 1964 (although it continues to occasionally release work). The festival displays the wide range of Titanus’s output, including Michelangelo Antonioni’s Le Amiche, Dario Argento’s The Bird with Crystal Plumage, Ermanno Olmi’s The Fiancés, Francesco Rosi’s The Magliari, Elio Petri’s Numbered Days, Federico Fellini’s The Swindle, Steno’s Totò Diabolicus, and Vittorio De Sica’s Two Women, but not Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard; the tremendous cost of filming Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s epochal novel played a major role in the company’s downward fortune.

DIOR AND I

Documentary follows Raf Simons as he becomes new creative director of Christian Dior

DIOR AND I (Frédéric Tcheng, 2014)
Film Forum, 209 West Houston St., 212-727-8110
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th St., 212-875-5601
Opens Friday, April 10
www.diorandimovie.com

After working on two previous fashion-related films, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel and Valentino: The Last Emperor, Frédéric Tcheng makes his solo directorial debut with Dior and I. In April 2012, fashion designer Raf Simons was named the new creative director of Christian Dior, bringing along his right-hand man, Pieter Mulier. Tcheng goes behind the scenes to follow Simons as he prepares his first-ever haute couture collection, which is due in a mere two months. Tcheng zooms in on the Belgian designer’s working methods and general anxiety as he takes over at the legendary company, developing important relationships with Dior CEO Sidney Toledano, première atelier flou Florence Chehet, première atelier tailleur Monique Bailly, the seamstresses, the models, and other employees. Simons chooses to pay homage to Dior’s past with his new collection while attempting to rid himself of the designation of “minimalist designer.” One of his most fascinating directions is attempting to incorporate the work of artist Sterling Ruby into his designs. All the while he is haunted by the ghost of company founder and New Look creator Christian Dior, who is shown by Tcheng in archival footage accompanied by a voice-over of Omar Berrada reading from Dior’s memoirs. Dior and I is a slight but affecting race against time, as one man in the present honors the past while laying the groundwork for a bright future. Dior and I opens April 10 at Film Forum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, with Tcheng and Berrada appearing at Film Forum for the 7:30 show April 10 and the 5:20 show April 11; Tcheng will also be at the Walter Reade Theater for a Q&A following the 7:00 show April 11.

DANCE ON CAMERA — BORN TO FLY: ELIZABETH STREB vs. GRAVITY

Documentary reveals how Elizabeth Streb and her Extreme Action Company (including Jackie Carlson, seen here) take dance to a whole new level

BORN TO FLY: ELIZABETH STREB vs. GRAVITY (Catherine Gund, 2014)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Sunday, February 1, 3:20
Festival runs January 30 – February 3
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com
www.borntoflymovie.com

Over the last several years, New Yorkers have gotten the chance to see Elizabeth Streb’s Extreme Action Company perform such dazzling works as Ascension at Gansevoort Plaza, Kiss the Air! at the Park Avenue Armory, and Human Fountain at World Financial Center Plaza as her team of gymnast-dancer-acrobats risk their physical well-being in daring feats of strength, stamina, durability, and grace. In addition, Streb herself walked down the outside wall of the Whitney as part of a tribute to one of her mentors, Trisha Brown. Now Catherine Gund takes viewers behind the scenes in the exhilarating documentary Born to Fly: Elizabeth Streb vs. Gravity, going deep into the mind of the endlessly inventive and adventurous extreme action architect and the courage and fearlessness of her company. Gund follows Streb as she discusses her childhood, her dance studies, the formation of STREB in 1985, and her carefully thought out views on space, line, and movement as her work stretches the limits of what the human body can do. “I think my original belief and desire is to see a human being fly,” Streb says near the beginning of the film, which includes archival footage of early performances, family photos, and a warm scene in which the Rochester-born Streb and her partner, Laura Flanders, host a dinner party in their apartment, cooking for Bill T. Jones, Bjorn Amelan, Anne Bogart, Catharine Stimpson, and A. M. Homes. Gund also speaks with current and past members of the talented, ever-enthusiastic company — associate artistic director Fabio Tavares, Sarah Callan, Jackie Carlson, Leonardo Giron, Felix Hess, Samantha Jakus, Cassandre Joseph, John Kasten, and Daniel Rysak — who talk about their dedication to Streb’s vision while using such words as “challenge,” “velocity,” “endurance,” “magic,” “invincibility,” and “risk” to describe what they do and how they feel about it.

Elizabeth Streb and her partner, Laura Flanders, prepare for a dinner party in new documentary

Gund focuses on the latter, as virtually every one of Streb’s pieces is fraught with the possibility of serious injury, as evidenced by their titles alone: Fly, Impact, Rebound, Breakthru, and Ricochet, not to mention the use of such materials as spinning I-beams, plastic barricades, dangling harnesses, and a rotating metal ladder. “I have to be able to ask someone to do that and be okay about it. Those aren’t easy requests,” Streb explains. “Knowing where you are is how you survive the work,” adds former STREB dancer Hope Clark. Gund goes with Streb to her doctor, where the choreographer describes what happened to her gnarled feet, and also meets with former dancer DeeAnn Nelson Burton, who had to retire after breaking her back. The film concludes with an inside look at STREB’s spectacular “One Extraordinary Day,” a series of hair-raising site-specific events staged for the 2012 London Olympics at such locations as the Millennium Bridge, the London Eye, and the sphere-shaped city hall, photographed by documentary legend Albert Maysles. In her Kickstarter campaign, Gund (Motherland Afghanistan, A Touch of Greatness) said, “Action architect Elizabeth Streb has reinvented the language of movement. [Born to Fly] will rewrite the language of documentary.” That’s a bold declaration, but the film does have a lot of the same spirit that Streb displays in her awe-inspiring work. Born to Fly is screening with Benjamin Epps’s 2014 short, Angsters, on February 1 at 3:20 at the Walter Reade Theater as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s annual “Dance on Camera” series and will be followed by a Q&A with Gund and Streb. The festival runs January 30 – February 3 and includes such other movement-related works as Meredith Monk’s Girlchild Diary, followed by a Q&A with Monk and cast member Lanny Harrison; Kenneth Elvebakk’s Ballet Boys, set at the Norwegian Ballet School; Louis Wallecan’s Dancing Is Living: Benjamin Millepied, followed by a Q&A with the director; the U.S. premiere of Don Kent and Christian Dumais-Lvowski’s Jiri Kylian: Forgotten Memories; Isaki Lacuesta’s Perpetual Motion: The History of Dance in Catalonia, followed by a Q&A with choreographer Cesc Gelabert; and a handful of free events as well.

NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL: THE GO-GO BOYS

Documentary looks into the life and career of Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus

THE GO-GO BOYS: THE INSIDE STORY OF CANNON FILMS (Hilla Medalia, 2014)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Thursday, January 29, 1:00 & 6:15
Festival runs through January 29
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com
www.facebook.com

At the beginning of The Go-Go Boys: The Inside Story of Cannon Films, director Hilla Medalia asks Menahem Golan, “How do you become a filmmaker?” He answers, “Don’t do anything else.” For most of his life, that is exactly what Golan did. He started out making movies as a kid, then went into business with his cousin, Yoram Globus. The Israeli dynamic duo formed quite a pair, Golan the outgoing, bombastic, viciously driven writer, director, and producer, Globus the behind-the-scenes moneyman and dealmaker. The Go-Go Boys documents their careers as they first succeed in Israel with such movies as Eldorado and Sallah Shabati, the latter starring Topol and earning an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, then setting off to take over Hollywood, where in 1979 they bought Cannon Films, specializing in the rapid-fire release of low-budget schlock and exploitation pictures. All told, Golan and Globus made more than two hundred films, from Death Wish II with Charles Bronson and American Ninja with Michael Dudikoff to Missing in Action and The Delta Force with Chuck Norris and New Year’s Evil with Roz Kelly, from King Solomon’s Mines with Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone and The Last American Virgin to John Cassavetes’s Love Streams and John Derek’s Bolero with Bo Derek. Golan and Globus are perhaps most well known for their biggest failures: The Apple, considered one of the worst films ever made; Over the Top, in which they overspent and overreached with Sylvester Stallone in a misguided mess about arm wrestling; and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, which led to their ultimate downfall.

Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus were the kings of Hollywood for a short period

Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus sought to become the kings of Hollywood — and did for a while

Both Golan and Globus sit down for new interviews with Medalia, who also speaks with Joel Silberg, whose Breakin’ firmly established the duo as real players; Israeli actors Yehuda Barkan (Lupo Goes to New York) and Yehoram Gaon (Kazablan), who share funny vignettes about working with them; director Boaz Davidson (Lemon Popsicle), who says, “They were the Israeli Hollywood”; director Andrei Konchalovsky and actor Jon Voight, who made Runaway Train, which tallied three Oscar nominations; Jean-Claude Van Damme (Bloodsport), who talks about crying in front of Golan while trying to get a job; and writer-director Eli Roth, who discusses the influence of their work on him. Medalia also meets with members of Golan and Globus’s family, as their wives and children relate stories about the pair’s utter dedication to cinema, often at the expense of being around. But as Globus’s son Ram says, “They completed one another. It was a train that couldn’t be stopped.” The film is a bit of a rehashed mishmash; even at a mere eighty-five minutes, it is overloaded with old interviews and entertainment segments; although it’s fun seeing some of Ed Bradley’s 60 Minutes report on how Golan and Globus took over the Cannes Film Festival — where, appropriately enough, The Go-Go Boys premiered, in May 2014 — far too much of the TV program is shown. The documentary also doesn’t delve quite deep enough into how really bad so many of their pictures were, giving their stunning low quality relatively short shrift. When Medalia says to Golan, who passed away last summer at the age of eighty-five, “I want to hear about the failures,” he responds quite defiantly, “There were none.” The Go-Go Boys is screening at the New York Jewish Film Festival on January 29 at 1:00 and 6:15 at the Walter Reade Theater; the twenty-fourth annual festival continues through that night with screenings and special events at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum.

NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL — WAR AGAINST WAR: 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 Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Wednesday, January 21, 6:15
Festival runs January 14-29 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com

In Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo’s gripping neo-Realist war thriller The Battle of Algiers, 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 new 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 nearly 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. The Battle of Algiers is screening on January 21 at 6:15 at the Walter Reade Theater as part of the War Against War sidebar program of the twenty-fourth annual New York Jewish Film Festival, which focuses on antiwar films from the 1950s and 1960s; the schedule also includes Stanley Kubrick’s Fear and Desire with Peter Watkins’s The War Game, Kon Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain, Konrad Wolf’s I Was Nineteen, and Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers, centered by a panel discussion on January 19 at 3:00 at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center (free with advance RSVP) with Kent Jones, Martha Rosler, Harrell Fletcher, and Trevor Paglen, moderated by Jens Hoffmann.

NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL — WAR AGAINST WAR: FIRES ON THE PLAIN

Kon Ichikawa’s harrowing FIRES ON THE PLAIN is part of War Against War sidebar of 2015 New York Jewish Film Festival

FIRES ON THE PLAIN (NOBI) (Kon Ichikawa, 1959)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Monday, January 19, 1:00
Festival runs January 14-29 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum
212-875-5050
www.nyjff.org
www.filmlinc.com

Kon Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain is one of the most searing, devastating war movies ever made. Loosely based on Shohei Ooka’s 1952 novel and adapted by Ichikawa’s wife, screenwriter Natto Wada, the controversial film stars Eiji Funakoshi as the sad sack Tamura, a somewhat pathetic tubercular soldier on the island of Leyte in the Philippines at the tail end of World War II. After being released from a military hospital, he returns to his platoon, only to be ordered to go back to the hospital so as not to infect the other men. He is also given a grenade and ordered to blow himself up if the hospital refuses him, which it does. But instead of killing himself, Tamura wanders the vast, empty spaces and dense forests, becoming involved in a series of vignettes that range from darkly comic to utterly horrifying. He encounters a romantic Filipino couple hiding salt under their floorboards, a quartet of soldiers stuffed with yams trying to make it alive to a supposed evacuation zone, and a strange duo selling tobacco and eating “monkey” meat. As Tamura grows weaker and weaker, he considers surrendering to U.S. troops, but even that is not a guarantee of safety, as the farther he travels, the more dead bodies he sees. Fires on the Plain is a blistering attack on the nature of war and what it does to men, but amid all the bleakness and violence, tiny bits of humanity try desperately to seep through against all the odds. And the odds are not very good. Fires on the Plain is screening January 19 at 1:00 at the Walter Reade Theater as part of the War Against War sidebar program of the twenty-fourth annual New York Jewish Film Festival, which focuses on antiwar films from the 1950s and 1960s; the schedule also includes Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, Stanley Kubrick’s Fear and Desire, Konrad Wolf’s I Was Nineteen, Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Carabiniers, and Peter Watkin’s The War Game, anchored by a panel discussion on January 19 at 3:00 at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center (free with advance RSVP) with Kent Jones, Martha Rosler, Harrell Fletcher, and Trevor Paglen, moderated by Jens Hoffmann.

NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL OPENING NIGHT: THE MUSES OF BASHEVIS SINGER

Documentary delves into Isaac Bashevis Singer’s love of women and their work as his translators

THE MUSES OF BASHEVIS SINGER (Asaf Galay & Shaul Betser, 2014)
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Wednesday, January 14, 4:00 & 8:45
Festival runs January 14-29
212-875-5050
www.filmlinc.com
www.the-muses-of-bashevis-singer.com

Who ever thought that little old Yiddish mensch Isaac Bashevis Singer was such a horndog? Asaf Galay and Shaul Betser begin The Muses of Bashevis Singer, their light and playful documentary, with the following quote from the Nobel Prize-winning author: “In my younger days I used to dream about a harem full of women. Lately I’m dreaming of a harem full of translators. If those translators could be women in addition, this would be paradise on earth.” Well, it seems that Singer, who was born in Poland in 1902, emigrated to the United States in 1935, and died in Florida in 1991 at the age of eighty-eight, found that paradise, as Galay and Betser meet with a series of women who were among many hand-picked by Singer, the man who nearly singlehandedly preserved Yiddish literature in the twentieth century, to serve as his translators, and not necessarily because of their language skills. “There were certain women who were more than just translators to him. It happened quite often,” says his Swedish publisher, Dorothea Bromberg, who also talks about Alma, Singer’s wife of more than fifty years. “He loved her, I’m sure, in his own way,” she adds. “She was very jealous of him, and she was completely right.” Galay and Betser meet with translators Eve Fridman, Evelyn Torton Beck, Dvorah Telushkin, Marie-Pierre Bay, Duba Leibell, and Dr. Bilha Rubenstein as well as Singer biographers Florence Noiville and Janet Hadda, his granddaughters Hazel Karr and Merav Chen-Zamir, Yentl the Yeshiva Boy playwright Leah Napolin, and his longtime secretary and proofreader, Doba Gerber, who share intimate, surprising tales about the author of such books as The Family Moskat, The Magician of Lublin, Shosha, and Enemies, a Love Story and such short stories as “Gimpel the Fool,” “A Friend of Kafka,” and “Zlateh the Goat.”

The seventy-two-minute film, lifted by a bouncy, airy soundtrack by Jonathan Bar-Giora, also includes footage of Singer making speeches, appearing on interview programs, going to a Jewish deli, walking on the Coney Island boardwalk, and writing with pen on paper and on a typewriter with Yiddish characters. But as the title implies, The Muses of Bashevis Singer doesn’t depict him as a callow cad but as a determined writer — and father and husband — who just loved women, loved being surrounded by women, using them as inspiration for his marvelous stories that mixed fiction with reality. “Isaac was a very frisky old man,” says Leibell, who worked with Singer in his later years after he moved to Florida with Alma. “That’s to put it very mildly.” The Muses of Bashevis Singer will have its U.S. premiere as the opening-night selection of the New York Jewish Film Festival on January 14 with screenings at 4:00 and 8:45 at the Walter Reade Theater, both followed by Q&As with the directors. The twenty-fourth annual festival continues through January 29 with screenings and special events at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum.