Film
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MOMA Streams Salacia by Tourmaline
Transgender Life in 1830 Seneca Village
By: - Jun 25th, 2020Salacia is a short film made by Tourmaline, a transgender artist who discovered a compatriot in a New York City Village located in Manhattan in 1830. It was one of the few places in America that black people could own land and vote. It was taken by eminent domain to make way for Central Park.
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Man in an Orange Shirt
Vanessa Redgrave in Britich Film
By: - Jun 16th, 2020The real beauty of this engaging, powerful and achingly poignant film lies in the performances of its sublime ensemble cast. They’re experienced, talented, and spot-on in their portrayals, and all are in the thrall of the great 80-year-old (when she made the film) Vanessa Redgrave. The great ones never seem to lose that special gift of star quality.
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Joseph Nechvatal’s Art Springs From Algorithms
Viral Venture Online at White Page Gallery
By: - Jun 15th, 2020Long before we had heard of, or even imagined, viruses like Covid-19, Post-Minimal painter, multi-media artist and art theoretician Joseph Nechvatal was generating them. Not the contagious types, but computer-robotic assisted ones.
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Palm Springs ShortFest
Upcoming Virtual Festival
By: - Jun 12th, 2020For the first time in the festival’s history, ShortFest, will not host an in-person event. Instead, the Palm Springs ShortFest, one of the most prestigious film festivals and the largest film market for short films in the world, remains undaunted and will present a ‘virtual festival’ that will run from June 16 through June 22, 2020.
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MoMA Streams "Right On" from The Last Poets
Produced by Woodie King Jr and Directed by Herbert Danska
By: - Jun 11th, 2020MoMA is streaming a restored print of Right On!, a classic film released in the early 1970s. Featuring The Last Poets, we are taken back to the origins of Hip Hop and of the first presentation of black culture by blacks. Felice Luciano, one of the original poets, speaks briefly about the prophetic poetry of the group. Fifty years ago they predicted today.
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HERE Presents Disposable Men
James Scruggs Multi-faceted Picture of Black Men
By: - Jun 10th, 2020HERE has always been on the cutting edge of multi-disciplinary art. In 2005, they produced Disposable Men by James Scruggs. Scruggs presented the black man as the object of fear in communities. People in turn rise up against innocent men of color. Amadou Diallo, shot 41 times on his doorstep in New York in February 1999 is Scruggs' jumping off point.
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Translating Movies into Opera
Why Operatic Movies Fail on Stage
By: - Jun 07th, 2020It is tempting for current composers of new opera to use films as a jumping off place. In two recent efforts, the creative artists miss the strength of the film's story arc and flatten their effort to create opera. Marnie at the Metropolitan Opera (and English National Opera) and Breaking the Waves (Opera Philadelphia) both overlook the strengths which provide drama in the films on which they are based.
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Showtimes Streams Mary Magdalene
Biblical Tale with Feminist Twist
By: - May 01st, 2020Showtime recently screened the intriguing 2018 movie “Mary Magdalene”, written by Helen Edmundson and Phillipa Goslett, directed by Garth Davis. This provocative, revisionist, version (with undertones of the current worldwide feminism movement) gives one the opportunity to think outside the accepted “biblical box” concerning the role of women in history both religiously and socially.
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Documentaries on Art and Design
What to Stream When Home Alone
By: - Apr 02nd, 2020Most of us are now hunkered down and isolated, inundated by 24/7 news coverage of depressing medical and economic conditions, compounded by failed White House leadership. To lighten our burden, just a bit, here is a list, with thumbnail reviews, of nine excellent documentary films about architecture and design.
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Seventh Seal
Playing Chess with Death
By: - Mar 14th, 2020Recently, on Turner Classic Movies, I saw Ingmar Bergman’s iconic 1957 film Seventh Seal. That was before the death of the actor Max Von Sydow or the widening global pandemic. Yet again there is the contrast of art and artifice. Art is a means of navigating the collape of the American Empire in real time and vivid color. When this passes what will be left of our arts, culture and way of life? How will we pick up the pieces of a new order? Will the elections of 2020 be yet another cancellation? Is this Apocalypse Now?
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Metropolis Ensemble Debuts at National Sawdust
Ricardo Romaneiro's Score for Fritz Lang's Metropolis
By: - Mar 11th, 2020Metropolis is a Grammy-nominated Ensemble founded by Andrew Cyr, who encourages artists to realize their bliss. The group was not named for the Fritz Lang film, but the temptation to take on this silent great must have been tantalizing. The live, electronic score by Ricardo Romaneiro was brilliant and brilliantly realized by the musicians. Cyr conducts.
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Film: The 70th Berlinale 2020
From February 20 - March 1
By: - Mar 04th, 2020The 70th Berlinale, the huge international film festival in Berlin took place between February 20th and March 1st, 2020. Great expectations were put upon the new festival leaders, Carlo Chatrian (artistic director) and Mariette Rissenbeek (executive director).
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Lincoln Center Great Performers' Mahler
Surrounded by Concerts and Films
By: - Feb 26th, 2020Lincoln Center's Great Performers surrounded us with Gustav Mahler for five days. In addition to a concert by Ivan Fischer conducting the Budapest Festival Orchestra, three films were offered.
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Dutch Thriller Instinct
At Palm Springs International Film Festival
By: - Jan 17th, 2020This year another Dutch film is in the Oscar hunt. It is a powerful, psychological, provocative thriller called “Instinct”. It’s set in a prison where a newly arrived, experienced psychologist Nicoline, (rivetingly played by Carice van Houten) is assigned to the case file of serial sex offender Idris (a clever psychopath scarily portrayed by Marwan Kenzari).
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An Almost Ordinary Summer
Launches Palm Springs International Film Festival
By: - Jan 17th, 2020The Palm Springs International Film Festival (PSIFF), the third-largest film festival in America, began in 1989 as the dream of then Hollywood celebrity turned politician and former Mayor Sonny Bono, who had a dream of making his city a focal point for the motion picture industry by launching an annual film festival.
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Obama’s Picks for Best Films
Everyone’s a Critic
By: - Dec 30th, 2019The conventional wisdom is that everyone is a critic. Which is an insult to those of us who pursue the difficult and complex craft. Why on earth would I give a fig about the year end movie list of former president Obama? I don't dabble in politics or take up brain surgery as a hobby. Having an opinion, and posting on social media, does not make you a critic.
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Teodor Currentzis Brings Verdi to The Shed
Dramatic Performance Accompanied by Jonas Mekas Images
By: - Nov 22nd, 2019The Verdi Requiem conducted by Teodor Currentzis with the musicAeterna Orchestra and Chorus is performed at The Shed through November 24. The McCourt is a grand space and can seat 1,250 and hold 2000 standing. Designed to be flexibly conformed, this performance has bleacher seats extending from the floor before the stage up to the rafters, or heavens if you will. This program's music is both other-worldly and very much in the now.
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Verdi's Requiem with Tedor Currentzis at The Shed
New Views on a Great Work
By: - Nov 14th, 2019A hundred-member orchestra and an 80-member chorus from Perm Russia perform Verdi's Requiem at The Shed in Hudson Yards, New York. Direct from Salzburg where it received rapturous reviews this re-imagining has been eagerly awaited. For ten days prior to the performances on November 19-24, Jonas Mekas' filmed response to the music was screened. It was at first a shocking take, beautiful images of flower blossoms one after another. The Requiem is a work of sublime beauty. It also has Dylan Thomas's rage at death. Mekas shows this in black screens and sometimes winds raging through branches and dessicating leaves.
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Hitchcock's Psycho Score at NY Philharmonic
Orchestra Performs Bernard Hermann's Classic
By: - Sep 15th, 2019The New York Philharmonic performed the New York premiere of Bernard Hermann’s Psycho score, accompanying a huge projection of the film. Richard Kaufman, a veteran conductor of film and television productions, conducted. David Geffen Hall was filled with a hip audience of film buffs, who cheered when the classic image of the Bates Motel first appeared on the screen.
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Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center
Live from Lincoln Center Presents first International Broadcast
By: - Sep 04th, 2019The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center is upward bound, on an odyssey filmed by Live From Lincoln Center as they journeyed through Greece. We visit the remote hills of Pelion and churches in Volos and Milies. Unusual and exotic locations are the setting of performances: from a Bach violin solo performed movingly by Aaron Boyd in a magnificent amphitheater to the wonderful Octet for strings that Mendelssohn composed at 16 years of age as he embarked on his classical career.
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TIME:Spans Festival at DiMenna Center
Nikel with Tscherkassky's CinemaScope Trilogy
By: - Aug 17th, 2019TIME:SPANS is a Contemporary Music Festival presented by the Earle Brown Music Foundation Charitable Trust at the DiMenna Center in New York. The Nikel Ensemble was featured in the first half of the Festival. Nothing daunts them. Wearing long extensions on their fingers, they kept the beat to Simon Løffler's music which accompanied a Peter Tscherkassky adaptation of The Entity, a classic psychological horror film.
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The Great Buster at Mostly Mozart
What Buster Keaton and Mozart Have in Common
By: - Jul 17th, 2019Mostly Mozart programmers ask the most obvious question at the start. Why a film about Buster Keaton in this festival related to Mozart? Seeing the film, an easy comparison can be made with Papagano, the physical actor/singer in The Magic Flute, which will play in a charming version at Lincoln Center. Yet it is the quality of the work that is truly similar.
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WBCN: The American Revolution
Award Winning Documentary Film by Bill Lichtenstein
By: - Mar 19th, 2019Recently, WBCN: The American Revolution had its first public screening at DC Independent Film Festival. It was judged Winner Best Documentary 2019. Bill Lichtenstein launched the project in 2009. There was at the time no archive dedicated to the legendary alternative rock station. Now there is as the film conflates talking heads, images, sound tracks and vintage footage. More than a radio station, WBCN provided the sound track and social media platform for the coming of age of 250,000 college students during an era of war, protest, and a dynamic counterculture.
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WBCN and the American Revolution
Bill Lichtenstein Discusses His Documentary Film
By: - Mar 03rd, 2019On March 7 the documentary film WBCN and the American Revolution will have a sneak preview at the DC Film Festival. On March 9, 12 and 13 there will be screenings at the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose. A world premiere is being planned for Boston in April. The day after wrapping the film Bill Lichtenstein discussed the project which started in 2006. The story of WBCN is set against events from the launch of the radical FM station in 1968 to developments surrounding the resignation of Richard Nixon seven years later.
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One County Film Company
South Florida Brothers' New Movie Business
By: - Jan 22nd, 2019Brothers Andrew and Tim Davis' appearance as siblings in True West inspired a film-making collaboration. Work is under way on a second feature film even while the first has experienced multiple showings. The Davis brothers have big plans for their One County Film Company.
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