March 22, 2020

92Y Launches Online Film Class Tied to Five Criterion Channel Masterpieces

If you’re looking to take a break from binge-watching garbage television and exercise your brain during quarantine, film historian Annette Insdorf and 92Y might have a perfect solution for you. Beginning Sunday, March 29, you can take the online film course “Reel Pieces Remote: Classic Films with Annette Insdorf,” for five weeks every Sunday at 8 p.m.

The five films she has selected — all of them indisputable masterpieces — can be streamed on The Criterion Channel. (And if you’re a cinephile in quarantine without an account, subscribe, subscribe, subscribe!) You can view the film any time before the Sunday night class, along with a prerecorded introduction from Insdorf, followed by the weekly lecture that will also engage live group discussion. Signing up for the 92Y class includes a free Criterion Channel trial membership good for 45 days. The cost for the five courses altogether is $150 — not free by any means, if you’re in the position to enroll.

Below is the tentative syllabus for the course, which features special attention paid to opening sequences. As three of the films are set against the backdrop of World War II, political intention will also be explored. Complicity and guilt come up in films such as “Z” and “On the Waterfront,” the latter of which served as director Elia Kazan’s doubling down on having given the House Un-American Activities Committee the names of eight actors who had been members of the Communist Party.

Mar 29: “To Be Or Not To Be” (1942), directed by Ernst Lubitsch, starring Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, Robert Stack. The first example of “black comedy” in treating Nazis on screen; here, they are challenged by a clever acting troupe.

Apr 5: “On the Waterfront” (1954), directed by Elia Kazan, starring Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden, Rod Steiger, Lee J. Cobb. The Oscar-winning tale of a boxer “who coulda been a contender,” caught between loyalty to the mob and a growing sense of conscience.

Apr 12: “Ashes and Diamonds” (1958, Poland), directed by Andrzej Wajda, starring Zbigniew Cybulski. Considered one of the greatest films ever made by Francis Coppola as well as Martin Scorsese, this drama unfolds on the last night of World War II: a charismatic young soldier of the Polish Nationalist Army questions the order to kill the representative of the Polish Communist Party.

Apr 19: “Z” (1969), directed by Costa-Gavras, starring Yves Montand, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Irene Pappas. A heart-pounding, Oscar-winning political thriller based on a true story during the Greek military dictatorship: a magistrate investigates an attack on a progressive hero as well as the ensuing cover-up.

Apr 26: “The Tin Drum” (1979, Germany), directed by Volker Schlondorff, starring David Bennent, Charles Aznavour, Angela Winkler, Daniel Olbrychski, Mario Adorf, Heinz Bennent. Winner of the Palme d’or at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, this epic is adapted from the novel by Gunter Grass. The film adopts the riveting perspective of Oskar, who decides at the age of 3 to stop growing.

Source: IndieWire film

March 22, 2020

Boaz Yakin Got Sick of Hollywood and Made His Most Personal Movie in 30 Years

The 1994 Sundance Film Festival may have been immortalized by Kevin Smith’s “Clerks,” but Boaz Yakin’s debut “Fresh” made out well enough. After scripting “Punisher” and “The Rookie,” Yakin directed a spry African American crime drama that put his career on a steady upward trajectory. That culminated in 2000 football hit “Remember the Titans,” which grossed $136.7 million and suggested a bright future in the studio system.

Yakin, however, wasn’t sure he wanted that. His latest movie, “Aviva,” marks his most personal movie in 30 years — and only would have been possible with those decades of roadblocks behind him. “I was a super-hot director after ‘Remember the Titans,’ and everyone in Hollywood wanted to work with me,” the 53-year-old New Yorker said in a recent interview. “I was being offered gigantic movies. I just had this moment where I was like, oh no, if I go down this road, I’m not going to remember how to be the creative person I want to be.”

Over the last 20 years, that struggle has continued. Yakin’s career has followed an uneven trajectory that includes intimate character studies “Death in Love” and “Boarding School,” as well as the Jason Statham genre indulgence “Safe” and the canine military adventure “Max,” all while the filmmaker has juggled work-for-hire screenwriting gigs ranging from “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” to “Now You See Me.”

At long last, Yakin has managed to return to genuine personal filmmaking, by stripping away virtually all potential resources to make a self-financed experimental movie based on his own life. “Aviva” had been scheduled to premiere at last week’s now-canceled SXSW Film Festival, and its still-delayed launch feels oddly appropriate for a movie that speaks to its director’s unsteady path.

A freewheeling blend of dance and surrealist interrogations of gender identity, the movie consolidates Yakin’s various relationship crises and battles with depression into an unclassifiable two-hour odyssey. Littered with fourth-wall breaking indulges and characters played by male and female dancers who switch places throughout, the movie shows what can happen when the floodgates of creativity open wide after decades of pent-up frustration.

“My entire adult creative life has been this very, very upsetting push and pull between trying to succeed in an industry that doesn’t like to do the things I like to do, and trying to find a way to fit myself in that’s sustainable,” Yakin said. “This time, I didn’t want to limit myself at all.”

“Aviva”

Yakin teamed up with choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith, whose nimble dance work serves as many of the movie’s high points. At its center, a Yakin stand-in named Eden wrestles with whether or not to marry his Israeli partner Aviva after she moves to New York with him. That scenario stems in part from Yakin’s relationship with ex-wife and “Honey Boy” director Alma Har’el, though Yakin made it clear that much of the ensuing narrative draws from other romances and some of it was pure fiction. “There are elements of my marriage, of course, and experiences with my fiancée, but it really is a work of fiction,” said Yakin. “I’ve always struggled with my own discomfort and frustration with myself and how it’s affected my relationships in general.” (He declined to speak more specifically to Har’el’s role in the project, though sources close to both of them say that he made it with her blessing.)

Among the more unusual twists, “Aviva” finds characters transitioning from male to female at unexpected moments, blurring the nature of a traditional heterosexual romance by transforming it into a stranger meditation on internal battles between masculine and feminine proclivities. Yakin said he was inspired in part by Luis Buñuel’s 1977 “That Obscure Object of Desire,” in which one woman is played at different moments by Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina. “I wanted to take it to this other place where you basically express both sides of the same person between two different people,” Yakin said. The dance element stemmed from a longstanding desire to tip his hat to his parents, who worked as pantomimes. (His father has taught movement at Juilliard for 50 years.) “Untraditional theater has been a part of my life for a long time and I never really got to express it,” he said. “I wanted to make a movie that had dance and movement in a way people hadn’t seen before.”

Enter Smith, a veteran of Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company, whose work involves a complex agility and dancers putting their full bodies on display. When her choreography takes over, “Aviva” transforms from doleful romance to something more entrancing and strange, from a swirling barroom dance party to a mystical wedding sequence. “I was trying to take mundane gestures and expand them,” Smith said, “playing with those gestures until they became something supernatural or magical. It was all about trying to understand what would serve the story so it wouldn’t just become music videos.”

The device looped back to one aspect of Yakin’s history with Har’el, as Aviva eventually embarks on shooting a documentary about dancers in the desert. That passage refers to her mesmerizing 2011 debut “Bombay Beach,” a boundary-pushing portrait of isolated lives against the backdrop of the Salton Sea. Yakin, who produced the movie, said it pushed him to consider the potential of working on a micro-budget scale. “It was so inspiring to me to see what she was doing with that,” Yakin said. “There was no studio, no financiers. It’s a homegrown movie she made herself. The thing that’s beautiful about it is that it’s made without any support, so it could be anything.”

And “Aviva” certainly embraces an anything-goes attitude. The movie shows less investment in fusing its disparate parts together than in gathering fragments of ideas to represent a complex life. In a staggering musical sequence that stands out from the rest of the story, Yakin flashes back to his childhood, as a trio of kids rap into the camera and march through the city, ride the subway, and end up in Coney Island.

“We just got out on the street and did it,” Yakin said. “Then we shot on the train going to Coney Island, waited for it to get a little empty, and just started dancing.” He laughed. “I might be getting a little too old for this shit, but it was fun.”

Yakin relished the opportunity to explore the possibilities of guerrilla filmmaking, but wasn’t convinced it could overtake his life. “It’s not a sustainable career model,” he said. “How many movies can you pay for? At some point, you’ve gotta fucking eat.” Yakin continues to work on more commercial projects, and recently scripted the African American western “The Harder They Fall,” a Netflix production currently on hold. He sometimes wonders what might have been, if he’d embraced the opportunities that followed “Titans” and become a full-on studio filmmaker. “I’ll never know if I would’ve been able to take ‘X-Men 3’ or whatever the fuck I was offered at the time and just do it,” he said. “Would I have been able to come back from that and explore the things I wanted to explore? I suspect I wouldn’t have.”

Now, of course, he’s left in the same limbo as countless filmmakers, with a new movie in the bag seeking distribution and other projects delayed for the foreseeable future. In spite of everything, Yakin said he’s staying optimistic about whatever comes next.

“Obviously, in the moment of crisis itself, the priority has to be dealing with people’s health and security,” he said. “But the arts and expressiveness of communication has been at the heart of what makes us people. While we’re in the moment, we have to deal with this, but who we are as people and how we express our experiences will always be valid.”

Source: IndieWire film

March 22, 2020

Movie Theaters Are Closed, but Their Value Isn’t Lost to Us Yet — Analysis

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to dismantle civilization as we know it, many of the rituals that we once accepted as part of our social contract have already have been reconfigured. Movie theaters may not be a matter of life or death — at least not for those of us who weren’t employed by them — but at a time when most of us have little to do besides sit home and re-evaluate every aspect of our collective existence, film industry pundits have pounced on the idea that theatrical exhibition will soon be unmasked as one of those great American grifts; as an outmoded scam that people will no longer be willing to pay for if and when things ever go back to “normal.” As The Ankler columnist Richard Rushfield recently said in an interview with The Ringer: “It’s not like the average American is going to miss the habit [of going to the movies during the pandemic] and it’s not like they need much reason to stay away from theaters forever.”

Such thinking is the logical conclusion to a story that Hollywood has been telling itself since the early days of streaming, and for now, it fails to convince. Movie theaters are struggling, but their experiential value hasn’t faded, and that’s enough of a reason to assume that they aren’t gone for good.

Consider where we were a few weeks ago. 2019’s domestic box office totaled a staggering $11.4 billion (down four percent from the all-time record set the previous year), and Disney’s undeniably disturbing portion of that was offset by a wide array of original hits like “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” “Knives Out,” and “Hustlers.” We’re still only a month removed from the Safdie brothers’ “Uncut Gems” cracking $50 million, and a Korean-language film doubling the local gross of “Cats” before winning Best Picture. (If you somehow still haven’t seen “Parasite,” you have some options.) Netflix itself has proven that people will pay money to see good movies in theaters even if they’re available to stream at home, and the theatrical model has managed to survive a hyper-entitled digital culture that thinks downloading a torrent is no different than buying a ticket.

“Knives Out”

Claire Folger

There’s an embarrassment of evidence that different modes of viewing can co-exist, but the prevailing wisdom maintains that the future won’t be satisfied until it’s fully cannibalized the past — that people don’t want to go to the movies, and that the studios would rather they didn’t have to worry about it. But while Rushfield is right when he goes on to say that shoddy multiplexes haven’t done themselves any favors over the last few decades (eternal shame on AMC for not masking its screens!), he’s wrong about the rest. People still want to go to the movies, and whenever this pandemic ends, that desire won’t go away.

But first we have to face the facts: This is unquestionably the worst crisis that movie theaters have ever faced. For more than 100 years, American cinemas stayed open during wars, terrorist attacks, and presidential assassinations; it only took this virus just a few days to so completely paralyze the industry that the National Association of Theatre Owners is asking the government for a bailout, boutique chains like the Alamo Drafthouse have furloughed all of their employees, and New York cinephiles have started a charity fund for the city’s beloved cinema workers. Many independent theaters may never be able to open their doors again.

The global film industry on the whole has already lost $7 billion due to the pandemic, and is estimated to have lost $17 billion by the end of May. The bleeding will continue long after that, and when it does finally come to an end, millions of Americans will be out of work and without less disposable income to spend on $20 tickets for “Peter Rabbit 2.” And then you have to factor in the lingering trepidation that will continue to affect theaters after the smoke clears, especially if our inept government isn’t able to account for constant new clusters of the virus or make a vaccine widely available to all people across the socioeconomic spectrum. Lingering trepidation will affect theaters long after. And to think, it was only two weeks ago that it seemed like the 4K restoration of “Come and See” would be the most depressing movie event of the year.

Assessing the carnage, analyst Rich Greenfield predicted that “studios are going to think more and more about why they are relying on third parties to distribute their content.” And like all big ideas, that thinking started with “Trolls: World Tour.”

“Trolls: World Tour”

On March 16, Universal announced that — due to the impending pandemic — the sequel to 2016’s “Trolls” would be skipping its planned theatrical run and going direct to premium VOD. For exhibitors, it surely felt like being kicked when they were down. The original “Trolls” was basically just a feature-length promotional campaign for the hit single Justin Timberlake wrote for it, and yet it still grossed $346 million. Despite that cancelling the wide release of “World Tour” was the only way of calling any real industry attention to it, some journalists responded to the news as though it were the Berlin Wall falling down all over again.

When Universal later announced that it was going to pivot “The Invisible Man,” “Birds of Prey,” and the Focus-released “Emma.” to VOD after the pandemic cut into those movies’ theatrical runs, people acted as though it were some kind of opportunistic Trojan horse attack into viewers’ homes, but it’s exactly like this strategy guarantees a quick fix: As IndieWire’s own Anne Thompson explained: “Traditionally, no studio would favor straight to video; digital rentals and sales are 62% smaller than they were in 2004, and they cannibalize the higher-value channel of theaters.”

Regardless of how the pandemic reshapes the film Industry, the taxonomical gap between theatrical and streaming content will continue to grow wider. But that will only further entrench the need for both to exist, and casual movie fans who think they want to watch everything at home are missing the forest for the trees: They’re forgetting that the way we watch things has a direct effect on the way we make things, and that — as Quibi is threatening to prove — the standards of theatrical entertainment are the last bulwark we have against a corporatized push towards passive viewing. It’s a cultural war based on the premised on the idea of art that only asks for half of your attention, and has the nerve to sell that as a feature instead of a bug.

More importantly — and this bears repeating — people want to go to the movies! People want to go to the movies so badly that drive-in theaters across the country saw an immediate surge in ticket sales as soon as multiplexes began to close their doors. Exhibitors don’t just ask consumers to pay a premium for a bigger screen and louder sound, they offer a fundamentally different viewing phenomenon than you can have at home. They offer a rare pocket of freedom in an overloaded world, a publicly ritualized opportunity to engage with art in its proper frame, and a collective experience that even the most introverted among us will be craving before long.

Streaming technology is a remarkable tool that allows for life-changing levels of exposure and access, but movie theaters have become one of the only affordable places in modern society where people of all backgrounds and political affiliations can reconcile themselves with a shared reality — where we can laugh together, cry together, and experience the indescribable horror of watching “Cats” together. There’s a reason why cinemas have emerged as a bellwether for China’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic: “Green Book” may not be the best way to bait people into leaving their houses, but it’s the thought that counts.

Staring at the horizon in the days after this crisis began, Georgetown economics professor James Angel told Variety to think of the pandemic as “a wildfire that comes through. The conditions build up, and there’s very dry brush at the end of an economic cycle. And suddenly, after the fire, everybody starts to rethink ‘Do we really need to rebuild the same house in the same spot?’” If there’s still a film industry when the fog lifts, there’s no doubt that it will be a wildly different place. Some of its proverbial houses will be condemned forever, while others will need to be knocked down and rethought.

But whatever happens in the meantime, it does no good to raze cinemas to the ground and salt the earth where they once stood. Movie theaters aren’t about to be unmasked as an archaic inconvenience that should be consigned to the ruins of our pre-coronavirus world. On the contrary, they’re about to become a painful reminder of how suffocating it can be to experience spectacle in private. And the only way to emerge from this tragedy with a strong foundation on which to rebuild and improve film culture is to embrace the conviction that one day, movie theaters will open their doors again.

Source: IndieWire film

March 18, 2020

StoryCorps’ Response to COVID-19

StoryCorps Pauses Recording Operations

In light of the public health concerns associated with the coronavirus COVID-19, StoryCorps has suspended recording operations (recordings with the public) at our locations. This impacts people with appointments in Atlanta, Chicago, Fresno, CA, Salt Lake City, Utah, and all field recording trips that initiate from these locations.

If you have an appointment in one of these locations between now and April 12, and your appointment needs to be rebooked, StoryCorps will contact you. When possible, we will help you rebook for a later date.

If you would like to record your story using the StoryCorps App, please visit this page where we have links to questions and a video to explain how to use the app.

All StoryCorps staff are working remotely during this time, in order to heed guidance from the CDC and our local health departments in regards to preventing the spread of coronavirus and acute respiratory illnesses.

If you have further questions, please feel free to reach out to StoryCorps Public Support at contactus@storycorps.org

Our call center is open 24/7 at 1-800-850-4406.

Please visit this post for updates in the coming days.

UPDATED March 18, 2:45PM ET

2020 Mobile Tour visit to Salt Lake City is Canceled

In order to ensure the safety and wellbeing of our staff and of participants in Salt Lake City, we are canceling our visit, heeding guidance of health authorities to prevent any potential spread of the coronavirus COVID-9. We understand that it’s disappointing; we’ll do everything we can to with our partners at KUER help you record your story with your loved one using our StoryCorps App and other tools. 

If you had booked an appointment in Salt Lake City, we will contact you.

Source: SNPR Story Corps