New documentary explores the art of Crutchmaster Bill Shannon

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COMING UP IN NOVEMBER!

CRUTCH, a documentary about the life and artistry of dancer Bill Shannon, will stream its world premiere through DOC NYC on November 11 and be accessible through November 19. A project of award-winning directors Sachi Cunningham and Chandler Evans (aka Vayabobo), the film follows the development of Shannon in his native Pittsburgh as an energetic youngster with a passion for skateboarding, hip hop and basking in the gaze of whatever audience he could find. His diagnosis with Legg-Calvé-Perthes disease--a degenerative condition of the hip--complicated but did not stop his trajectory as a performer. Instead, with crutches that alleviate the pain of walking and dancing, he built a unique movement technique and began experimenting with ways in which performers and audiences interact and how disabled and non-disabled people relate to one another.

CRUTCH is an introduction to Shannon's origin story and family life, his personality and creative process. I recall being immediately smitten with this dancer so sparked by the pulse, intensity and joy of the streets. That might have been in the early 2000s. I have not seen his work since his 2010 excursion through Lower Manhattan, Traffic: A Transit-Specific Performance, with his audience following and viewing him from inside a bus. In the intervening years, New York City's dance presenters and critics have grown more familiar with the spectrum of disability artistry, and this makes me hope that the worth of Shannon's skill and ideas will be better understood today than they were nearly twenty years ago.

CRUTCH (USA, 2020) 

SEE CRUTCH at DOC NYC, November 11-19

Instagram: @crutchdoc
Twitter: https://twitter.com/crutchdoc
IMDb: https://pro.imdb.com/title/tt4441460

 

Ellice Patterson of Abilities Dance Boston (photo:

 AND THIS THURSDAY NIGHT!

Dancer-choreographer Ellice Patterson's troupe, Abilities Dance Boston, which includes performers with and without disabilities, uses dance as a tool to tell stories, process emotions and promote intersectional disability rights with an emphasis on artists of color and queer artists.

Celebrity Series of Boston will stream Abilities Dance Boston's concert (with audio descriptions) this Thursday, October 29 at 8pm EST. 

Tickets for the digital concert are free with your RSVP here.

 
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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve, at Gibney, as Senior Director of Artist Development and Curation and Editorial Director. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Kick those blues: Glatzer's "Alive & Kicking" helps brighten our dark time

When it previews next month at the 45th Annual Dance on Camera, a festival co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Dance Films Association, Susan Glatzer's Alive & Kicking (2016/USA) is sure to be a crowd-pleasing highlight. An expansive yet intimate look at contemporary swing dancing, the 84-minute documentary celebrates this practice and its community of freewheelers with their rollicking swing dance camps and competitions. Swing dancers depend on a network of international competitions to display their talents and build teaching careers, the only way they can monetize their artistry. The film depicts swing dance as a healing force in a society that has lost touch with touch itself--except where touch involves a fingertip and a screen. Glatzer eagerly argues for swing dance as a low-risk way to foster openness and trust between people of all kinds, a natural bridge across divides of race, ethnicity, gender, religion and politics.

The earliest moments of the film made me worry that Glatzer would confine her focus to young white people reclaiming a historic dance phenomenon that originated in Harlem's Black community, the product of Black genius and skill. But I'm glad I hung in with Alive & Kicking. Not only does this film respectfully address the Black roots of swing dance in Harlem's Lindy hop, but this history is often spoken for by Black dancers themselves, and the film lovingly includes clips of Frankie Manning, Lindy hop's great authority and ambassador, who passed in 2009. Glatzer's interviewees also note the scarcity of young Black swing dance students and performers today. They recognize the need to make their community an attractive, accessible source of opportunities for Black students and performers, an issue contemporary tap dance has also faced.

And, like tap, swing dance has a strong tradition of improv, of connecting with a new partner at one of those fun gatherings and the creative surprises those moments can hold. "You're sharing your imagination with someone else," says one of the dancers, and Glatzer shows us examples of first-time interplay between skilled dancers leading to mutual awe, gratitude and something quite a bit like love.

Alive & Kicking screens on Monday, February 6 (8:30pm) with Kristen Lauth Shaeffer's animated short, 349 (3 min). There will be a Q&A with Susan Glatzer. For tickets, click here.

For information about the complete Dance on Camera 2017 schedule of screenings and public events, click here.

Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th Street (north side, upper level), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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"Dance on Camera" at Film Society of Lincoln Center, February 12-16

Above: Dance artist and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer in
Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer
Below: Cuban ballerina Viengsay Valdés in
Horizons/Horizontes
These two documentaries will be screened
at Film Society of Lincoln Center
in the 2016 Dance on Camera festival.

Curated by Liz Woolf and Joanna Ney, the 2016 edition of Dance on Camera once again explores the multifaceted histories and expressions of dance through film documentaries, shorts, features, experimental works, and music videos. You won't want to miss Jack Walsh's Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer, an engrossing collage of interviews and footage in which radical dance artist Rainer, now 81, reveals "I love existing in front of spectators" and traces her adventurous, eccentric pathway from the Judson revolution to her filmmaking work and subsequent return to choreography. Why not subtitle this The Lives of Yvonne Rainer? She's had as many as any wily cat.

See Feelings Are Facts (82 min) on the festival's closing night, Friday, February 16 at 8pm, including a Rainer/Walsh Q&A. (Click for details and tickets.)

I also got advance look at two films with a Cuban connection:

My body is in Cuba, but my soul is in Africa, and it is my African soul that nourishes my Cuban body.

--Alfredo Duquesne Mora (El Duque), Cuban artist, woodcarver and stonemason, in They Are We

They Are We: In this affecting film, anthropologist and first-time director Emma Christopher documents how she united people from an Afro-Cuban ethnic group, Ganga-Longoba, with their counterparts across the Atlantic in a Sierra Leone village. Learning that these Cubans, descendants of African slaves, know and regularly practice their traditional songs and dances, the Africans react with surprise, keen interest and generosity. Despite notable redundancy, Christopher's film has genuine emotional impact.

See The Are We (77 min) on Monday, February 15 at 3:15pm, including a Q&A with Emma Christopher. (Click for details and tickets.)

All along, I knew there's an easy life I could have chosen but did not.

--lyrics from "With My Heart" by Heidi Happy, in Horizons/Horizonte 

Horizons/Horizontes: Eileen Hofer connects intimate and ultimately poignant portraits of three generations of Cuban ballet dancers. The film opens with vintage footage of Cuba's queen of classical dance, the now nonagenarian Alicia Alonso, flawlessly performing multiple fouettes. Then Hofer quickly introduces us to two younger women aspiring to follow in Alonso's footsteps at Ballet Nacional de Cuba--Viengsay Valdés, a rising star, and Amanda de Jesús Pérez Duarte, a student hoping to join the company. Their stories demonstrate how much ballet requires--a sacrificial investment of body and psyche to create the illusion of effortless grace, an art both sensual and brutal. Cuba keeps ballet and its stellar dancers tied closely to the glory of its revolution--a political relationship completely unimaginable on the US scene.

See Horizons/Horizontes (71 min) on Saturday, February 13, 1pm. (Click for details and tickets.)

For a complete lineup of 

Dance on Camera screenings

and associated events, click here.

Screenings will be held at:

Walter Reade Theater
16 West 65th Street, Manhattan
(map/directions)

Panels and free events will be held at:

Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Auditorium
144 West 65th Street, Manhattan
(map/directions)

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L. M. Kit Carson, 73

L. M. Kit Carson, Actor and Writer, Dies at 73
by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, October 28, 2014

Israel disputes designation of Arraf film as Palestinian

The Hand That Feeds Bites Back
Israel and Suha Arraf Differ on Nationality of ‘Villa Touma’
by John Anderson, The New York Times, October 16, 2014

Film honors modern dancer Michio Ito

Review of Michio Ito: Pioneering Dancer-Choreographer
by Timothy Cowart, The DFA Blog, January 23, 2013

Interview with director Bonnie Oda Homsey
by Timothy Cowart, The DFA Blog, January 23, 2013

NEWFEST LGBT film festival starts Friday

NEWFEST, New York City's festival of LGBT films, starts this Friday at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater. Click here for complete program schedule and ticketing details.

Human Rights Watch Film Festival

Heroes, Villains and the Invisible 
Human Rights Watch Film Festival at Lincoln Center
by Stephen Holden, The New York Times, June 14, 2012

Festival to screen Barredo's "The Table"

Here's a note from the delightful Ana Barredo, filmmaker:

Remember me? I made the documentary The Table which you wrote a wonderful blog about a few months ago. Anyway, our doc will be screening in NY again on May 16th. Would you mind spreading the word on this upcoming screening? I'd really appreciate it! Thanks in advance! 

You got it, Ana!

Wednesday, May 16, 7pm

Admission: $10 

United Film Festival New York
Cobble Hill Cinemas
265 Court Street, Brooklyn

To read my original post on The Table, click here.

Queer/Art/Film

Queer/Art/Film Series at IFC Center Continues Gay Film Legacy
by Erik Piepenburg, The New York Times, March 17, 2012

Reelabilities film festival and Heidi Latsky Dance

The 4th Annual Reelabilities: NY Disabilities Film Festival

February 9-14

ReelAbilities: NY Disabilities Film Festival is the largest festival in the country dedicated to promoting awareness and appreciation of the lives, stories and artistic expressions of people with different disabilities. Initiated in New York in 2007, the festival presents award winning films by and about people with disabilities in multiple locations throughout each hosting city. Post-screening discussions and other engaging programs bring together the community to explore, discuss, embrace, and celebrate the diversity of our shared human experience.

Schedule information and ticketing
Festival trailer

HEIDI LATSKY DANCE

a performance for Reelabilities

free and open to the public

Saturday, February 11, 2pm -- The JCC in Manhattan
Monday, February 14, 4pm -- 115th Street New York Public Library

Pushing her physically integrated work beyond conventional boundaries, Heidi Latsky offers a preview of Somewhere. Wildly different renditions of "Over the Rainbow," a song so easily misconstrued in the context of disability, propel a celebration of physical virtuosity, movement, invention and the sheer joy of dancing. Also included will be an excerpt from work-in-progress SOLO COUNTERSOLO featuring original music by Chris Brierley. Performance will be followed by a discussion with the artists.

ACCESSIBILITY INFORMATION

ReelAbilities strives for inclusion of all people. Individuals needing accommodations to participate should contact the screening venue directly at least two weeks in advance of the event.ASL interpretation, CART, Live Audio Description, and information in Braille are available upon advance request. All films are captioned or subtitled and all venues are wheelchair accessible.

How "Dance on Camera" grew

In advance of the 40th Annual Dance on Camera festival (January 27-31), its curator, Deirdre Towers, recounts its history.

A flash to the past
by Deirdre Towers, The DFA Blog, Dance Films Association, January 2, 2012

Moving images

Breath Made Visible (2009)
directed by Reudi Gerber
Argot Pictures
English; 80 min.

Anna Halprin

"My greatest love is dancing in the natural world. The birds dance and the clouds dance. Everything is in motion all the time," says Anna Halprin--movement shaman, the subject of this affecting portrait and chronicle by filmmaker Reudi Gerber.

Through vintage and more recent footage of performances and workshops as well as interviews with Halprin, her colleagues, her late husband, the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, and daughter, the dancer and psychologist Daria Halprin, Gerber traces the arc of a life that remains, in this woman's ninth decade, open to the deep currents of the natural world, of society, of relationship and of the body.

Halprin's early-career decision to leave New York for California--to join Lawrence--removed her from the center of the dance world but presented intriguingly different environmental and social realties and rhythms to explore. Much later, a cancer diagnosis brought Halprin to another critical decision--to turn away from choreography and performance for the public and refocus her efforts on dance as a powerful modality for personal and societal healing.

Gerber has an eye for stunning imagery, a sensitivity for human feelings, and an awareness of the mythic quality of Halprin's narrative. He gives us a sweetly humble yet heroic woman whose concern for people and loving engagement with life are instructive and inspiring. Breath Made Visible brought me to tears.

Purchase Breath Made Visible here.

Find a theater screening of Breath Made Visible here.

*****

Lovers of dance film, hang on. Next year, shockingly, is not that far off! The 40th Annual Dance on Camera Festival will open at Lincoln Center, January 27-31, celebrating "the immediacy, energy, and mystery of dance combined with the intimacy of film."

Look for director Ron Honsa's Never Stand Still--a grand, kaleidoscopic exploration of the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, down through the ages and up to the minute, narrated by Bill T. Jones and featuring...well, featuring just about everyone and every kind of dance you can imagine. It's a beauty. (2011. 74 min.)

If you've already enjoyed Check Your Body At The Door, producer Sally Sommer's fantastic documentary about underground house dancing, you might want to follow up with director Ina Sotirova's freedom2dance. Going to Dance on Camera Festival? See both on the same night--January 31. Far more conventional in structure than GYBATD, Sotirova's documentary puts the struggle around New York's nightlife culture and social dancing into historical and political context. (Yes, I'm looking at you, Rudolph Giuliani!) Check out the Facebook page for freedom2dance. (2011. 20 min.)

Mis Caminos a Través de la Danza (My Paths Through Dance), written, directed and produced by Daniel G. Cabrero, tells the story of a young Spanish girl's early training in classical ballet in 1920s Paris and the fortuitous diversion of her career from ballet towards the Bolero and diverse regional dances of her homeland. Influenced by the legendary Antonia Mercé "La Argentina," the youngster grew up to become Mariemma (1917-2008), performer, choreographer uncompromising educator and ensemble director of international renown. She was a dancer of great verve and warmth, dedicated to a dramatic, sculptural clarity of movement.

This film marks Cabrero's full-length feature debut, and he has a charming story to tell and a treasure trove of documentation--vintage photos, footage and prints--as well as contemporary interviews with colleagues, students and dance critics. Instead of injecting cutesy (and cringe-worthy) animated elements into the story's flow, Cabrero would have done well to place more trust in his wonderful historical materials. They are more than enough. If you can overlook these occasional lapses in taste, and the often awkward, sloppy English subtitles, there's a lot to learn and to enjoy. (2010. 90 min.)

For full information on the program and schedule of the 40th Annual Dance on Camera Festival, visit these links:

Dance Films Association

Film Society of Lincoln Center

Tendu TV's Dance on Camera channel on Hulu

Honest Bill

Finding out quite late in the game about the 2nd Annual DOC NYC film festival, I was only able to get to one screening, but I chose well!
 
A Good Man--directed by Bob Hercules and Gordon Quinn is a ravishing and bracing documentary about two years in the making of Fondly Do We Hope… Fervently Do We Pray, the Bill T. Jones masterwork and meditation on the life of Abraham Lincoln, his complexity and his possible significance for American democracy in the current age. As Jones prepares this commissioned piece for premiere at the Ravinia Festival, we're taken behind the scenes. We become privy to his thought processes, his doubts and his often volatile working relationships with dancers and creative collaborators. This is an unflinching, warts-and-all portrait of one of dance's true superstars and geniuses but also an extraordinarily generous portrait of the talented individuals who support his visions, even under heavy fire, and bring them to powerful life.

After watching A Good Man, I tried to figure out why dance isn't the most popular and most rewarded art form in the United States. Okay, maybe it's just me, but who wouldn't want to spend quality time in a theater with these gods and goddesses who are also, as we see all too clearly, real live human beings? That duality--reflected in Jones, as in the Lincoln he was taught to admire--comes across through the sensitive and handsome work of Hercules and Quinn and their Director of Photography, Keith Walker.

A Good Man looks and sounds fantastic on the big screen, but you can catch it on American Masters (PBS) on Friday, November 11 at 9pm ET/PT (check local listings).

DOC NYC runs through next Thursday, November 10, at the IFC Center and New York University, with a fascinating range of programming. Get complete schedule and ticketing information here.

Get crazier: Wenders' "Pina"

Pina (Germany/France; 2011)
Written and directed by Wim Wenders
106 minutes
in German, English and French with English subtitles

Pina Bausch's surreal choreography and her matchless Tanztheater Wuppertal dancers look marvelous in Wim Wenders' 3D. If regular film and video typically flatten and evaporate live dance performance, 3D restores a good deal of the magic of the moment.

Here, in Bausch's primal Le Sacre du Printemps, is a woman scrunching around in a layer of red dirt; the palpable sensation of a hand slowly gliding over clothing and skin; a ripple of soft fabric as another dancer runs. Another woman gets separated from a crowd, and that isolation becomes more than an arrangement, an idea; it's personally threatening, our empathy, for once, no longer abstract sympathy.

In other places, bodies slither through the legs of chairs or hurl through the air to be caught as the viewer feels it all. The camera takes us close up, into the dances. Bausch's Romantic Vollmond ("Full Moon"), with its watery environment, revs into life in 3D, too. Wild gyrations and impulsive exaltations in the onstage pool of water and the artificial rain shower leave you, sitting at a supposedly safe distance, feeling good and splashed.

Brimming with energy, the film also includes excerpts from Café Müller and Kontakthof, the latter showing scenes performed by some of its interestingly age-variant casts. But if you love Bausch's work, you must see this film especially for the clips of Bausch's own exquisite dancing and for Wenders' unusual, lovely twist on the expected, often overused, strategy of the talking-head interview.

The New York Film Festival will present Pina on Saturday, October 15 at 6:15pm. Tickets are currently unavailable. Please watch the NYFF blog, Facebook and Twitter pages for specific announcements about changes in ticket availability. In addition, there will be a standby line at the screening venue’s box office day-of. For additional information about standby policies, please visit the NYFF Ticket Info page. 

Pina will be released in US theaters on December 23.

The 49th New York Film Festival
Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center
Broadway and 65th Street, Manhattan

Subway: #1 local train to 66th Street/Lincoln Center Station
Bus: The M5, M7, M10, M11, M66 and M104 bus lines all stop within one block of Lincoln Center.

Celebration of Greek film in New York City

The Fifth Annual New York City Greek Film Festival, heralding what presenters have called a new renaissance in Greek film, kicks off on October 16 and will run through November 6 at venues from Chelsea's Rubin Museum of Art to the Museum of the Moving Image.

This year's lineup includes Athina Rachel Tsangar's unconventional Attenberg, the first Greek film to be presented at the Sundance Festival and Greece's current contender for a Best Foreign Film Oscar. Its lead actress, Ariane Labed, won the Best Actress award at the 2010 Venice Film Festival.

Tickets are available now. Learn more about the festival's schedule of screenings and related events here.

New York premiere of "A Dangerous Method"

A Dangerous Method (UK/Canada/Germany; 2011)
Directed by David Cronenberg
Screenplay by Christopher Hampton
99 minutes

David Cronenberg, a filmmaker with a peerless grasp on the mysteries of the mind and the body, turns his attention to a seminal chapter in the founding of psychoanalysis. Adapted from Christopher Hampton’s play A Talking Cure, A Dangerous Method charts the relationship between Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and his protégé turned dissenter Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), as it was shaped by the case of Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a young Russian Jewish patient of Jung’s. Cronenberg brilliantly dramatizes not just the rivalry and rupture between two pioneers who defined a field but also the birth of their groundbreaking theories of the unconscious and the forces of Eros and Thanatos. Featuring an electrifying trio of lead actors, who turn near-mythic figures into flesh and blood, this is a film of tremendous vigor and ambition, a historical drama that brings ideas to life. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

###

Forget trying to get tickets for the New York Film Festival's two presentations of A Dangerous Method this evening at 6pm and 8:30pm. They're long gone. It was hard enough getting into yesterday's press screening, but I made it! As a longtime Jung fan--his work has deeply influenced my own development and counseling practice--I took great interest in David Cronenberg's romantic dramatization of a curious transitional moment in the great healer's career and life.

Based on a play by Christopher Hampton and diligent research into correspondence and the period, A Dangerous Method stars Michael Fassbender (Carl Jung), Viggo Mortensen (Sigmund Freud) and Keira Knightley (Sabina Spielrein) along with powerful supporting turns by Vincent Cassel (Otto Gross) and Sarah Gadon (Emma Jung). A Dangerous Method was filmed in Cologne and near the Alps at Lake Constance on the Rhine.

The opening scene barrels towards you, thrusting captive, mentally-ill Sabina Spielrein into your face. She bellows and struggles as a carriage hurtles her towards a hospital where she will meet Jung and become his patient. Keira Knightley's physical transformation in this and many subsequent scenes is wrenching. Under Cronenberg's direction, she works and strains that familiar jutting visage and angular frame and those vulnerable, melancholy eyes to great effect. Watching scenes like this, I thought the actress might be overdoing it. But--as Cronenberg explained in a post-screening Q&A--Spielrein's documented physical behavior was far more tortured and alarming.

In Jung's office, the camera shifts us from Spielrein's perspective (looking up at the doctor) to his (looking down on the patient), giving the audience a visceral sense of the indeed dangerous imbalance of power. Things will get stranger and more dangerous as the brilliant young analyst and his also secretly brilliant patient--the masochistic daughter of a brutal father--commence treatment and, over time, mentorship and an unethical, clandestine affair.

As her disturbing secrets spill under Jung's careful, insightful questioning, the doom-eager Spielrein concludes "There's no hope for me. I'm filthy and corrupt. I must never be let out of here."

Of course, we will learn that she is no such thing as, under Jung's care and propelled by love of him, she unfolds her own true insightful self, eventually becoming an analyst, too. But in these early scenes, Cronenberg contrasts her trauma and turmoil with the world of orderly, if static, domesticity that is the wealthy Jung household--every clean, gleaming detail of decor in place and just so.

A sub-theme contrasting the Swiss-German Jung--whose wife Emma provides the high level of living while dutifully tamping down her sensuality and her own intellectual brilliance--and the Russian Jewish Spielrein becomes even more pronounced as Sigmund Freud first takes Jung under his wing and then rejects him. Freud, aware of his outsider status as a Jew in Vienna and fiercely protective of his theories and adherents, challenges every new sign that Jung is moving towards ideas and behaviors that could bring the fledgling science of psychoanalysis crashing down around their heads.

In truth, Jung is unraveling and doing so in ways that will bring deep pain to himself and others. The ultimate transformation in this, the flowering of Jungian theory and practice, lies way in the future beyond Jung's suffering and beyond the scope of this film. Cronenberg leads us across a treacherous footbridge then stops just short of land.

The casting of the German-born Irish actor Fassbender, an irrepressibly charming hottie, and Cassel, whose uneven features suit his Trickster-ish role, are master strokes, but the entire cast is very fine.

Be sure to see A Dangerous Method when it opens in US theaters in late November.

A presentation of The 49th New York Film Festival
Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center
Broadway and 65th Street, Manhattan

Subway: #1 local train to 66th Street/Lincoln Center Station
Bus: The M5, M7, M10, M11, M66 and M104 bus lines all stop within one block of Lincoln Center.

Go on singing, more, more: Jobim remembered

So I come back to my first note
As I must come back to you...

--"Samba de Uma Nota Só"/"One Note Samba" by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Newton Mendonça 

Music according to Tom Jobim (aka, The Music according to Antonio Carlos Jobim), a new film by Nelson Pereira dos Santos, takes me back not only to the heyday of bossa nova but to my own days of mad love for the sounds of Brazil and Brazil-infused jazz. Jobim's lilting, romantic music flashed through my nerves and sent my young imagination reeling. Now dos Santos brings all of that back with this unusual documentary tribute, soon to open at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's New York Film Festival 2011.

Rejecting the expected voice-over and talking-heads approach, Dos Santos allows music--plus an extraordinary collage of vintage, and sometimes quite worn, film and video performance clips--to tell the story of Jobim's career in Brazil and abroad and the huge influence his songs had on performers around the globe. If you're old enough, you probably remember Jobim for "Garota de Ipanema" ("The Girl from Ipanema")--a worldwide 1960s hit that gets satiric treatment here through a surprising series of perfomance clips from the cute to the beyond-belief ridiculous. But there was so much more covert power to the delicious, delicate magnetism of Jobim's range of songs. You can feel that sensual, if wistful, pull in "Dindi," "Insensatez" ("How Insensitive"), "Desafinado" ("Off key"), "Wave," "Corcovado" ("Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars") and the haunting "A felicidade" ("Happiness"), the theme from Black Orpheus. Written solo or with lyricists like Newton Mendonça and Vinicius de Moraes, these lovely standards are songs to curl up inside.

Nearly seventeen years after Jobim's passing, it's both cheerful and poignant to watch him perform his music in this film. The composer's warmth and joy animate his every appearance even as we watch time thicken and age him. Even in one of his late performances, which looks rather labored, you can sense his commitment to the music and to his audience.

Dos Santos and co-director Dora Jobim, Jobim's granddaughter, have compiled footage recording sensational interpretations of Jobim songs by Gal Costa, Silvia Telles, Judy Garland, Sammy Davis, Jr., Diana Krall (who, sexy enough in English, wows the Brazilians by singing in Portuguese), Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Errol Garner, Jane Monheit, Stacey Kent and Milton Nascimento among many others. If I could design a heaven, Sarah Vaughn would be singing "Wave," an astonishingly sensitive Frank Sinatra would be dueting with Jobim on "Girl from Ipanema," and Ella Fitzgerald would smash her bottle of champagne on the good ship "Desafinado."

To borrow and flip some lyrics from "How Insensitive," let me be clear: This love affair ain't over.

Music according to Tom Jobim

by Nelson Pereira dos Santos
Brazil, 2011 (Regina Films)
Portuguese with English subtitles
88 minutes

October 2 at 6pm and 8:30pm (tickets)

A presentation of the New York Film Festival
Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center
Broadway and 65th Street, Manhattan

Subway: #1 local train to 66th Street/Lincoln Center Station
Bus: The M5, M7, M10, M11, M66 and M104 bus lines all stop within one block of Lincoln Center.

The story of Westbeth

Manhattan Film Festival presents

Westbeth--Home of the Arts (2011, 69 minutes)

Sunday, July 31 at Noon

...383 studio apartments in one complex of buildings. A groundbreaking utopian vision–offering space for art and artists’ families at affordable rents in New York City, it has been home to Diane Arbus, Merce Cunningham, Joseph Chaikin, Nam June Paik, John Scofield, Robert de Niro Sr, Vin Diesel, Gil Evans, Nadine Gordimer and 1000’s of artists for the past 40 years.

Symphony Space
Broadway at 95th Street, Manhattan
(map and directions) 

Tickets

Brazil's "Chico Xavier"

Chico Xavier
a film by Daniel Filho
(Brazil, 2010; 125 min.)

from Chico Xavier
Photo courtesy of Lereby Produções

Daniel Filho's film--making its U.S. premiere this week at the Museum of Modern Art's Premiere Brazil! festival--traces the life and work of Spiritist medium Chico Xavier (1910-2002). From childhood, Xavier ("Chico" is the diminutive for Francisco) just knew things about people, and his touch could center and calm them. The youngster's abilities unnerved his abusive godmother and ran counter to the teachings of the Catholic Church. But Chico drew widespread support as he grew into a gentle, unassuming young man who dedicated his life to serving the needs of the people, refusing to profit from what he says he had been given by the spirit world. Bringing individual messages and numerous books by way of automatic writing, he toiled--through personal suffering and sacrifice, through family dissension and turmoil--to offer comfort to others. Xavier became an important figure in Brazilian culture where Spiritism--introduced by the writings of the Frenchman Allan Kardec--accounts for a wide swath of spiritual practice, even among people who are, ostensibly, Roman Catholic.

How will non-Brazilian film-goers--especially skeptics or those with little interest in metaphysical practices--take to Filho's moody and languid narrative? The film has a muted, even dark, palette and can often be lulling over its two hours. But it benefits greatly from the presence of sweet-faced Ângelo Antônio who plays Xavier in his young adulthood (1931-1959). Antônio first appears on screen, and we grab him like an anchor. Few things can throw this guy--the character or the actor playing him--off course.

Visit the Chico Xavier movie site.

MoMA screening schedule:

Friday, July 15 (5pm)
Thursday, July 21 (4:30pm)
Friday, July 22 (4pm)

For a complete program information and schedule of Premiere Brazil! screenings (July 14-27), click here.

The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters
The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street (between 5th and 6th Avenues), Manhattan
(directions)