The Heretics

Showing at the Museum of Modern Art: The Heretics, directed by Joan Braderman

Synopsis from the MoMA website:

The Heretics reveals the inside story of Heresies, a feminist art collective that was at the epicenter of the 1970s art world in lower Manhattan. Director Joan Braderman, who joined the group in 1971 after moving to New York to become a filmmaker, charts the collective’s story for the first time in a feature-length film, revealing its pivotal role in the “second wave” of the Women’s Movement.

Unlike more traditional documentaries, the film is framed with striking digital motion graphics. Braderman combines intimate interviews with former collective members, archival footage from the 1970s, and documents of the collective—including the journal HERESIES: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, published from 1977 to 1992—to put the Heresies in the context of the larger second-wave movement, which was made up of thousands who met in small, private group settings to discuss issues and launch programs and actions relevant to women. The hundreds of Heresies members, now scattered around the globe and working as artists, writers, architects, painters, filmmakers, designers, editors, curators, and teachers, speak intimately about the extraordinary times they shared as they challenged the terms of gender and power and reimagined the lives of generations to come.

The film's website is here, and you can find the trailer in the MoMA link above, but it refuses to embed.

Netflix It: Talk to Me

Available on Netflix: Talk to Me, directed by Kasi Lemmons

Synopsis from the New York Times:

In 1966, when we first meet them, Petey Greene (Don Cheadle) and Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor) present an easy, obvious contrast. Dewey, rising fast in the management ranks of a Washington R&B radio station, favors trim suits and dark ties. When he speaks on the air, listeners are apt to mistake him for a white man. Petey, serving 10 years for armed robbery in a Virginia penitentiary, is a man of an altogether different — and, to Dewey, much lesser — sort. His speech is laced with profanities and put-downs, and he manages to look flashy even in prison, where he accessorizes his state-issued denims with bright red shoes and a flowery neckerchief. Their subsequent friendship, which spans an era of social upheaval and fashion turmoil, is at the center of Talk to Me, Kasi Lemmons’s funny, earnest, affectionate new film. Talk to Me starts out broad and schematic only to surprise you with its subtlety as it unfolds. The result is a movie that offers uplift without phoniness, history without undue didacticism and a fair number of funny, dirty jokes. — A. O. Scott



A clip of the real Petey Greene:

Araya

Opening at the IFC Center today: Araya, directed by Margot Benacerraf

Synopsis from the film's website:

The restoration of Margot Benacerraf’s brilliant 1959 tone poem Araya, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the film’s first showing at the Cannes Film Festival, will change the face of Latin American film history. Although it shared the Cannes International Critics Prize with Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Araya was never picked up for widespread distribution. Rarely shown, this masterpiece was largely forgotten by the film world. Milestone’s North American theatrical premiere and worldwide release in 2009 will give audiences the chance to rediscover Benacerraf — a powerful and distinctive voice in the history of cinema.

Benacerraf’s film portrays a day in the life of three families living in one of the harshest places on earth — Araya, an arid peninsula in northeastern Venezuela. For 450 years, since its discovery by the Spanish, the region’s salt was manually collected and stacked into glowing white pyramids. Overlooking the area, a 17th-century fortress built to protect against pirate raids stood as a reminder of the days when the mineral was worth as much as gold and great fortunes were made in the salt trade. Benacerraf captures the grueling work of these salineros in breathtaking high-contrast black-and-white images. Her camera gracefully pans and glides to reveal the landscape and the people of the peninsula. All night, the Pereda family toils in the salt marshes. In the morning, the Salaz clan arrives to load and stack the crystals under the hot brutal sun. Down the coastline, the Ortiz family fish and tend their nets, while the youngest member, Carmen, collects seashells and coral. 



When it first premiered, Araya was compared to Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran and Luchino Visconti’s La terra trema. But according to the filmmaker, the film was never meant to be a documentary — it was meticulously planned as a tone poem — a composition in which cinematography, music, sound and language combine to create a moving and magical exploration of a desolate place and the remarkable people who lived there. Araya is a film of such lasting beauty that Jean Renoir told Benacerraf, “Above all … don’t cut a single image!”


Araya is one of Milestone’s most exciting discoveries, on par with our earlier treasures, Killer of Sheep, The Exiles and especially I Am Cuba with which it shares many qualities: a stunning richness of image, sheer poetry of sound and visuals, and a profound respect for the people of Araya — Araya will have just as pronounced an influence on the next generation of filmmakers.

An Education in Theaters

Now in theaters: An Education, directed by Lone Scherfig

After the Storm

Now showing at the Museum of Modern Art: After the Storm, directed by Hilla Medalia

Synopsis from the film's website:

After the Storm is a feature-length documentary film that follows the production of the musical Once on this Island from auditions through performances and also includes the story of each young actor’s life in the wake of Katrina. The focus is not on rescues, evacuations and losses, but on survival, hopes and dreams.

The film explores the cultural landscape of New Orleans as seen through the eyes of these teenage artists. The goal of the film -- through character development and a narrative scene structure -- is to create an emotional and entertaining storytelling experience that celebrates the spirit and culture of New Orleans at a specific point in history. After the Storm depicts a unique American city and how it is beginning to piece itself back together. The film also explores how art can be used as a tool for healing and growth and the power a community wields by sharing its story, locally and beyond.

Filmmaker Hilla Medalia gently explores the young actors’ daily lives, how they are coping with a struggling school system, limited job opportunities and the loss of family members and friends. Through their eyes, the film’s audiences can view the recent history of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina’s impact through the lens of a group of talented young people.

Where is Where?

Showing at the Museum of Modern Art: Where is Where?, directed by Eija-Liisa Ahtila

Synopsis from the MoMA website:

Eija-Liisa Ahtila (b. Finland, 1959), an artist celebrated for her often interrelated moving image installation pieces and 35mm films, returns to MoMA with the New York premiere of her film Where Is Where?, a haunting and layered consideration of how history affects our perception of reality. Fifty years ago, during the Algerian war, two young Arab boys killed their French friend. In the present day, a European poet (played by the sublime Kati Outinen, known for her appearances in the films of Aki Kaurismäki) seeks to understand and interpret this event with the aid of the character Death. With her fluid, highly original use of multiframe images Ahtila expands, beautifully and arrestingly, the expressive power of cinema.

The New York Times, by the way, loved it.

Whip It in Theaters

Now playing: Whip It, directed by Drew Barrymore

Not to be confused with this:



(I would embed the real video, but YouTube is being a real a-hole about... what, copyright? Who could possibly lose money from Devo's video posted on a blog? Harumph.)