Bring Back Our Girls

Tonight, the Empire State Building’s red and purple lights signal New York’s solidarity with the Nigerian people. These are the colors of “Bring Back our Girls,” the movement to rescue the 219 schoolgirls abducted on April 14, 2014 by Boko Haram. Our hearts are with the girls who are still missing, and the love and courageous activism of their families and friends.

My First Review

Yesterday, I received the author’s copies of my book, and Lucia, one of the feline beasts who shares our apartment (does anybody own a cat?), turned in my first review. Family! Always our harshest critics!

Fragments for Spring . . .

This is a photo I took in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, fondly known as the "UP" to the locals. It has little to do with what is posted below. It just reminds me of spring, which is getting a slow start in New York City this year!

Glitches on Film Journal International's website remain, so some of my links are still broken. A spring cleaning and rebooting is imminent.

My review of Abderrahmane Sissako's "Timbuktu" appears in the latest print edition of Cineaste (https://www.cineaste.com//).

Please check my FB page for updates on my book: https://www.facebook.com/MariaGarciaNYC. "Cinematic Quests for Identity: The Hero's Encounter with the Beast" also has an Amazon page now: http://www.amazon.com/Cinematic-Quests-Identity-Heros-Encounter/dp/1442246979/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1427236438&sr=1-1&keywords=cinematic+quests+for+identity. Click on my name to see the "Author Page."

Finally, it must be Spring in New York City because the Tribeca Film Festival press screenings begin later this week. My coverage will be published online at FJI's "Screener Blog" in April. 

Love and Marriage Italian Style

I have just posted a link to "Italian Love and Marriage: How the Screen Classics Interpreted It" under Feature Articles (Print/Online). The feature, in which I discuss "Love with the Proper Stranger" and "Wild is the Wind," among other classics, appears in the latest issue of Ambassador, the magazine of the National Italian-American Foundation. 

Ongoing Exhibit at MoMA: My Interview with a Curator

Last fall, I interviewed Ron Magliozzi, an associate curator in the Film Department of the Museum of Modern Art about "100 Years in Post-Production." The ongoing exhibition is about a 1913 film in MoMA's collection from the New York City-based production company Biograph. The studio's unnamed project, which Magliozzi and his co-curator assembled into a rough cut for the exhibition, starred the Caribbean-American theater and film actor Bert Williams. My interview appeared in the Winter issue of Ambassador Magazine. I have placed a link to the left of this column under "Feature Articles." A note to filmmakers: MoMA is considering proposals for the footage.

An Insider's Film Festival: New Directors/New Films

One of the standout documentaries at New Directors/New Films is Stevan Riley's Listen to Me Marlon.

Native New Yorkers pride themselves in never paying full price for anything—not clothing or theater or opera tickets—and in knowing where to discover a great performer, or to see the work of a future star of the art world. With the advent of the Internet, finding these venues has become easier for everyone, although bargains are harder to come by. The halcyon days of the New York City Opera, and dozens of Off Off Broadway productions, are past, but the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center have preserved one New York City insider event for film buffs, the annual New Directors/New Films festival. (For information and tickets: http://newdirectors.org/)

ND/NF features art house cinema at its very best—a quirky, eclectic mix of films by young or newly minted filmmakers from around the world. While the $16 per screening “rack rate” may not appear to be a bargain, there are member rates, discounted student tickets and 4-movie package rates, as well as VIP tickets that include events and opening and closing night screenings. Both venues, Titus 1 at MoMA, and FSLC’s Walter Reade, are terrific theaters with stadium seating and good sound systems. From March 18th to the 26th, twenty-six features and sixteen shorts will screen at ND/NF by filmmakers who represent over a dozen countries including India, Israel, Japan, Georgia, Tunisia, Canada and the United States.

Nellina, one of the stars of an excellent documentary-narrative hybrid, Simone Rapisarda Casanova's The Creation of Meaning.

This is a still of Pacifico, the Tuscan shepherd at the center of The Creation of Meaning. In a quick shot of Pacifico's kitchen there is a snapshot of Nellina as a foal.

My Facebook Page for "Cinematic Quests for Identity"

Please visit my new Facebook page for updates on the book, and to read about new cinematic quests for identity and meaning. I hope you will participate in discussions, too. I have posted road pictures from my travels, remembered Alice Rohrwacher's "The Wonders" (2014), and listed the Oscar-nominated quest films. My Facebook page is "Maria Garcia, Author" and the URL is: https://www.facebook.com/MariaGarciaNYC.

My Book, "Cinematic Quests for Identity: The Hero's Encounter with the Beast"

Last week, as I walked onto the deck of the pool where I swim laps, Julie, one of my "pool friends," paused in mid-lap and shouted: "Where have you been? I have been asking about you all month. Is your book finally finished?"

It had been longer than a month since I had gotten to swim my usual mile--but I could answer Julie definitively, and in the affirmative. In fact, "Cinematic Quests for Identity" is in production. It will be published in late March or early April by Rowman & Littlefield. Their description appears here: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442246973

Oscar's Foreign Film Nominees Among the Best Movies of 2014 (Links to my Interviews with Two of the Filmmakers)

A still from Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida shows the title character, a nun who, on the verge of taking her vows, discovers her Jewish heritage.(Courtesy of Music Box Films)

The finest Oscar-nominated films of 2014 are in the Best Foreign Film category: Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida, Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan and Abderhamme Sissako’s Timbuktu, the last of which premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2014. Most movies in this category are “art house,” and these three are no exception. While they may not have received wide distribution originally, their Oscar nominations have led to re-releases in some cities. In New York City, for instance, Timbuktu and Leviathan are now screening at Film Forum, (http://filmforum.org/now_playing) and Ida recently reopened at Cinema Village (http://cinemavillage.com/chc/cv/).

In this still from Andrei Zvyaginstev's Leviathan, the isolation of the protagonist in a vast, empty landscape perfectly illustrates his predicament, as well as his sensibilities. (Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics).

All movies should be seen on the big screen, and this is especially true of Ida and Leviathan where the settings and the mise-en scène (the visual style of the film) do so much of the storytelling. The starkness of Pawlikowski’s 1960s-era Poland, and that of Zvyaginstev’s modern Barent seacoast of Russia, place in high relief the interior struggles of their respective protagonists, a novice nun who discovers she is Jewish, and a mechanic who is battling a corrupt politician attempting to seize his land. In the case of Sissako’s Timbuktu, based on the real-life Islamist occupation of that Malian city, the director’s sense of color and his excellent use of music and ambient sound, is best experienced in a theater. My review of this film appears in the upcoming issue of Cineaste.

My New York Film Festival interview with Sissako, a Mauritanian-born writer-director, "Defying Jihad: Abderhamme Sissako's 'Timbuktu' Dramatizes a City Under Siege," appears in the print version and on Film Journal International's website: http://www.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/content_display/esearch/e3ie83416ef2c00c3e3b59097c4170142f7. (Film Journal International is launching a new website design and there may be problems viewing the images attached to this article and the one below.)

I also interviewed Zvyaginstev, a Siberian-born filmmaker, when he was in New York City this Fall. That interview, "In the Belly of the Beast: Andrey Zvyaginstev's Acclaimed 'Leviathan' Depicts One Man's Fight Against Corruption in Modern Russia," may be seen here: http://www.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/content_display/esearch/e3i8d383049914604678e9d38d153e1272a. These two movies, along with Ida, would have been at the top of my "Best Films of 2014" list, which I did not have time to write this year. More about the project that prevented me from posting in my next entry . . .

Women Getting Angry: This Year's Best Documentary

This is just one of the many emotionally-charged archival photos that appear in the new documentary, She's Beautiful When She's Angry, opening on Friday, December 5th. To find screenings in your area, go to the official website: http://www.shesbeautifulwhenshesangry.com/.

Mary Dore’s She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry is a homage to the women whose intelligence and persistence led to most radical social reforms of the 20th century. And it all started here, in the United States. Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” (1949) notwithstanding, it was American women who first took to the streets for women’s rights, who shut down Congress, forced the Supreme Court to decide on a woman’s right to choose, compelled law enforcement to view rape as a violent crime, and burned their college degrees to protest the dearth of women’s history and literature in college curricula. The burning of bras and girdles followed, a symbolic relinquishment of standard concepts of beauty: The cry went out in 1970 that all women were beautiful and, as Dore suggests in this excellent documentary, even more so when they channel their anger.

Dore’s title is a twist on the condescending line used by men to minimize the effect of women’s anger. The filmmaker opens on a contemporary protest in front of the Texas state house in Austin. A speaker shouts, “Don’t mess with Texas women,” a play on that state’s unofficial slogan. Texas is “messing” with a woman’s right to choose, in defiance of federal law. Next, Virginia Whitehall, the founder of the first woman’s shelter in Dallas, and the daughter of a charter member of the League of Women Voters, delivers the documentary’s call to action: “You are not allowed to retire from women’s issues.”

She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry then moves to its lively, deftly edited mélange (accomplished by co-producer Nancy Kennedy) of archival film and photos, and interviews of its female subjects, all to the accompaniment of an expertly mixed score of women’s voices (by supervising sound editor Deborah Wallach and re-recording mixer Sean Garnhart) that highlights a variety of protest songs from the 1970s.

Among the women who appear in the documentary are iconic feminist leaders, such as author and educator Kate Millet (“Sexual Politics,” 1969), journalist and author Susan Brownmiller (“Against Our Will,” 1975), the founder of NOW, Jacqui Ceballos, and celebrated District of Columbia Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, who in 1970 became the most prominent feminist in New York City after being appointed by Mayor John Lindsay to head the Human Rights Commission. Lesser-known but equally influential women also appear in the film, including Fran Beal, co-founder of the Black Women’s Liberation Committee who in 1969 wrote what came to be known as the Black women’s feminist manifesto, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.”

'Tis the Season for Revivals: "The King and the Mockingbird" at the Film Society of Lincoln Center

 

In this still from the "The King and the Mockingbird," (a Rialto Pictures release) the eponymous character helps a pair of lovers escape an evil king. (Photo courtesy of Rialto Pictures.)

The King and the Mockingbird, an official selection at this year's New York Film Festival, was a labor of love for director and animator Paul Grimault, and his co-writer Jacques Prévert (Children of Paradise, 1946). The filmmakers lost rights to the movie shortly after it screened in France in 1953, and it was not until 1979, shortly before Prévert’s demise, that it was completed. The animated feature (in French with English subtitles), loosely based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, will open at Film Society of Lincoln Center on November 21st. A beautiful example of the traditional cell animation technique, which in today’s digital age is generally seen only in shorts, The King and the Mockingbird is intended for adult audiences.

The setting for the movie is the “rapid heart” kingdom of Tachycardia in which a cross-eyed ruler falls in love with the painted image of a shepherdess. As it turns out, the shepherdess loves another man. Charles V (voiced by Pascal Mazzotti) is not the first cinematic anti-hero to be drawn into or undone by a love triangle, but this king is a Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles in Citizen Kane), his castle a monument to his megalomania. The plight of the lovers (Agnès Viala and Renaud Marx), and the king’s peasants, are delightfully chronicled by a blind musician (Roger Blin) and the bird of the title (Jean Martin, best-known for his role in The Battle of Algiers). That bird, which continually "mocks" the king, was undoubtedly reborn as the song and dance man Honoré Lachaille (Maurice Chevalier) in Vincent Minnelli’s Gigi (1958).

Judy Irving's "Pelican Dreams"

Judy Irving and "Gigi" in the filmmaker's new documentary Pelican Dreams, opening in New York and LA on November 7th. (Photo courtesy of Shadow Distribution.)

About ten years ago, on a visit to a remote wildlife reserve in Mexico, I had my first glimpse of brown pelicans diving into the sea. My husband and I looked on as a flock of these large-winged birds seemed to shape-shift in mid-air, contracting their wings and hurling themselves downward, slicing through the surface of the water in order to catch the fish they had apparently spied from above. In Judy Irving’s Pelican Dreams, in a spectacular sequence that captures the efforts of young brown pelicans diving beside their elders, viewers can see one of these wonders of nature.

Irving had begun filming the birds over a decade ago and abandoned the project, but when a brown pelican landed on the Golden Gate Bridge recently, she recalled her childhood love of the birds and the 16 mm. footage she had shot of them. Brown pelicans breed on California’s Channel Islands, and that unlucky young bird, dubbed “Gigi” by Irving, was underweight, and had to be taken to a wildlife rehabilitation center. Irving followed her there. Throughout Pelican Dreams, the filmmaker speaks with about a dozen pelican caretakers, mostly in the San Francisco Bay area, who nurse the birds professionally, and who heal them in their backyards. All the pelicans are released back into the wild if they recover.

Henri Matisse's "Garden" Recreated at MoMA

These are two panels from the newly restored cut-out, "The Swimming Pool," by Henri Matisse, which is part of a new exhibit at MoMA. (Photo courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.)

The Museum of Modern Art’s new exhibition “Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs,” includes a newly restored work the museum purchased in 1973, “The Swimming Pool” (1952), among other spectacular examples of what the artist himself described as a “cutting out operation.” These works, which Matisse (1869-1954) began in the last decade or so of his life, were created with a pair of scissors and brightly colored gouache applied to white paper. The resulting shapes, which recur through several works, are sometimes imbricated, but often more simply arrayed across paper or burlap.

“The Swimming Pool,” pinned to burlap and on view in a room of its own, was the inspiration for the entire show. As Mr. Karl Buchberg, Senior Conservator at MoMA, explained at a press conference on Tuesday, he noticed the burlap was deteriorating and discoloring the paper. He proposed that it be replaced; the resulting restoration is what led to the idea of staging the exhibition. In a video which screens at the exhibit, Mr. Buchberg is seen removing some of that burlap thread by thread. He and Ms. Jodi Hauptman, Senior Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints, along with Ms. Samantha Friedman, Assistant Curator in that department, organized the exhibit, working in collaboration with London’s Tate Modern, which recently held a similar show. 

"Zulma" 1950, one of the cut-outs on display at MoMA's new exhibition. (Photo courtesy of MoMA.)

Tales of the Grim Sleeper Screens at The New York Film Festival Tonight

Fourth in a Series on The 52nd New York Film Festival. A fifth, on the restored Hiroshima Mon Amour, can be found here: http://screenerblog.blogspot.com/2014/10/alain-resnais-hiroshima-mon-amour-at.html

Pam, Nick Broomfield's (background) guide to the neighborhood in South LA where Tales of the Grim Sleeper was shot. (Photo courtesy of the New York Film Festival.)

Some documentaries are important, and Nick Broomfield’s Tales of the Grim Sleeper, screening at The New York Film Festival tonight, is one of them. But that does not mean the film is always comfortable to watch, as it sometimes skirts the boundaries of exploitation. In portraying the case of Lonnie Franklin, Jr., a Los Angeles serial murderer, the filmmaker worked with a small crew to produce a “high concept” documentary; it features America’s favorite evildoer police department, the LAPD, in one corner, and disenfranchised Blacks in the other. Broomfield maps a community devastated by crack cocaine, unemployment and poverty, and then skillfully employs a former drug addict, Pam, to garner the trust of people who could tell the story of these brutal crimes.

Frederick Wiseman's "National Gallery" Screens at New York Film Festival

In Frederick Wiseman's National Gallery, a restorer cleans a painting at the National Gallery in London. (Courtesy of Zipporah Films and the New York Film Festival.)

This is the third in a series of posts about The 52nd New York Film Festival. 

When introducing Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery at the New York Film Festival press screening yesterday, John Wildman (senior publicist) quipped that at three hours, it qualified as a “Wiseman short.” Several of the filmmaker’s documentaries run four hours, and Domestic Violence I and II, set in the Tampa police department and criminal court, run nearly six, yet like much of his work, these films are riveting portraits of private and public institutions. During his long career, Wiseman has also taken his two-person crew abroad for such films as La Comédie-Française (1996, 223 minutes) and La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet (2009, 158 minutes). All of his documentaries are classic, fly-on-the-wall perspectives of the sort that are a rarity today.

My interview with Frederick Wiseman for La Danse, which appeared in Cineaste, is under "Archives" to the left of this post.