Daily Archives: February 24, 2017

Like the US and Europe, Japan developed an experimental documentary movement in the 1960s and 70s that reflected and influenced the social, cultural, and political changes of the time. The Harvard Film Archive program Three Radical Japanese Filmmakers presents a trio of the more significant artists.

Motoharu Jonouchi, who was at the organizational forefront of the movement, is represented by Gewaltopia Trailer (1969) and Shinjuku Station (1974). Both are part of the so-called Gewaltopia series in which shots of spaces, objects, and clips from old movies including a political demonstration, an eyelid inscribed with calligraphy, a nuclear blast, and the 1920 silent movie The Golem are assembled into metaphorical statements.

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Masanori Oe and Marvin Fishmans Great Society (2016) presents a collage of images of events from the Lyndon Johnson era, such as the Vietnam War, antiwar demonstrations, the counterculture, and the civil rights movement as well as the inevitable nuclear bomb blast.

Perhaps the most significant film in the program and certainly the one with the most portentous title is Rikuro Miyais Phenomenology of Zeitgeist (1967), which records a happening in front of a bookstore in the city of Shinjuku. It is projected on multiple screens.

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The Globe's top picks for what to see and do each weekend, in Boston and beyond.

Three Radical Japanese Filmmakers screens Friday at 7 p.m. at the Harvard Film Archive. The films will be introduced by researcher and curator Go Hirasawa.

For more information go to hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2017marmay/radical.html.

One of my favorite documentaries of 2016, Tickled started out as a short, lighthearted feature about competitive endurance tickling. The gripping end result, by New Zealands David Farrier and Dylan Reeve, is a descent into an alternative universe of paranoia, power, and sociopathy. Its like a graphic novel by Thomas Pynchon.

Tickled airs Monday at 10 p.m. on HBO.

For more information go to http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/tickled.

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The blues dont get much more authentic than the music of Fred McDowell (1906-72), a Mississippi sharecropper who was discovered by the legendary Alan Lomax in 1959. McDowell toured with the Rolling Stones in the mid-1960s, was a guiding light for Bonnie Raitt, and influenced the music of Taj Mahal. Joe Yorks Shake Em On Down: The Blues According to Fred McDowell compiles interviews and never-before-seen performance footage of McDowell to tell the story of this giant of American music.

Shake Em On Down can be seen Sunday at 9 p.m. as part of the Reel South series on PBSs World Channel. It will stream online the day after broadcast at WORLDChannel.org.

For more information go to http://www.scetv.org/reelsouth.

A documentary that Ive been hearing a lot about and am looking forward to seeing is Mr. Gaga by Israeli filmmaker Tomer Heymann. Its about Ohad Naharin, a choreographer and the artistic director of the Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv. It won the audience award at last years South by Southwest Film Festival and was nominated for a European Film Award. A critic friend tells me, I dont want to give too much away, but there are narrative developments from the you-cant-make-that-up realm. Sounds like my kind of picture.

Mr. Gaga can be seen March 5 at 5 p.m. at the Firehouse Center for the Arts in Newburyport.

For more information go to http://www.firehouse.org/see-a-show/116-mr-gaga.

Trixie Little and the Evil Hate Monkey (the latter less intimidating than he sounds like a more hirsute version of Will Ferrell in Elf) had a dream to perfect their act a kind of low-tech, burlesque Cirque du Soleil and become stars. In her film aptly titled Us, Naked: Trixie and Monkey, documentarian Kirsten DAndrea Hollander follows their sometimes tempestuous, sometimes triumphant progress for seven years, including a stint at the New England Institute for Circus Arts in Brattleboro, Vt. If you dream it, you can be it, especially if youre willing to wear funny fake ears.

Us, Naked: Trixie and Monkey debuts Tuesday on DVD, VOD, and Digital.

For more information go to usnakedthefilm.com.

What better place to analyze how capitalist organizations work in a conspicuous consumption economy than in a Dallas Neiman-Marcus department store in the 1980s? Thats where auteur Frederick Wiseman sets up shop for The Store (1983), a surprisingly funny and fully engrossing documentary that covers every department in this department store from cashier to corporate office, from chi-chi customers to smile exercises for salespeople showing how it all works, and sometimes doesnt.

The Store screens as part of the Frederick Wiseman: For the Record series on March 5 at 12:30 p.m. and March 8 at 7:30 p.m. at Museum of Fine Arts.

For more information go to http://www.mfa.org/programs/series/frederick-wiseman-for-the-record.

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Looking forward to a rad week for nonfiction film - The Boston Globe

Every writer hopes his prose will persist, but James Baldwin made an especially solid bet: As long as the disease of American racism, resentment of homosexuals, and the nations strange relationship with social class and capitalism lasted, his work, he knew, would matter.

But when Baldwin died 30 years ago, it would have been hard to predict that books such as The Fire Next Time written as a letter to his nephew on the 100th anniversary of black emancipation or Giovannis Room a slender, once-obscure novel about a purportedly straight American and an Italian bartender who fall in love in Paris would half a century later sit at the center of the zeitgeist. Baldwin is back, says Harvard literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates. Bigger and badder than ever.

The African American author feels as central as he has since he landed on the cover of Time magazine in 1963, amid turmoil in Birmingham, Ala., for the poignancy and abrasiveness he brought to the nations dark realities. Some of this is because the energy of the Black Lives Matter movement recalls Baldwins own, and because the rising visibility of homosexuality over the last few decades made a resurgence likely if not inevitable.

But part of it is because Baldwin has stirred artists and writers in ways that no scribe of any color has done lately. Journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates whos become ubiquitous over the last two years based his award-winning book, Between the World and Me, explicitly on Baldwins Fire.

The years best reviewed film, Moonlight, is not simply about characters alienated gay black men who resemble Baldwins heroes. It also has some of the writers sensibility. The film, like much of Baldwins work, feels as European as it does American: Its dark, oblique lyricism seems to come straight out of MichelangeloAntonioni or Ingmar Bergman.

But the debt to Baldwin is direct. I describe Moonlight as sort of the child of Giovannis Room and The Fire Next Time, says Barry Jenkins, the films director. What I love about what Baldwin does is that the plot is important, but the emotions are much more what hes about. Thats the way Moonlight works too.

The last few months have seen an explosion of work that either deliberately or subtly riffs on Baldwins life and work. In December, the eclectic and questing musician Meshell Ndegeocello brought her church-themed piece Can I Get a Witness?, based on Fire, to Harlem Stage. About a week later, Stew and the Negro Problem performed Notes of a Native Song what the singer/ songwriter calls just a bunch of songs with banter in between at REDCAT. (The show has played in a handful of other cities, including New York, where Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison attended.)

Most directly is I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Pecks Oscar-nominated documentary about both the writer and a project he never completed on the deaths of Malcolm X, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and civil rights activist Medgar Evers. We hear Baldwins words, spoken by Samuel L. Jackson, over footage of the Rodney King beating, over protests in Ferguson, Mo., and shots of young black men in prison.

So Baldwin is not just a writer for the ages, but a scribe whose work as squarely as George Orwells speaks directly to ours.

For a long time, the Harlem-born, France-dwelling Baldwin was an august figure in the literary world, but not one whose books were especially well read. (Ironically, Baldwins books, notably The Fire Next Time and the companion book of I Am Not Your Negroare both Amazon bestsellers.)

He was a kind of little brother in the holy trinity that also includes Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, both half a generation older. None of those figures was simple, but among them, Baldwin was the most idiosyncratic and, in part because he was openly gay and a European exile, one who seemed furthest from the center of the black arts movement and the larger struggle. The militant black writer Eldridge Cleaver, in his influential Soul on Ice, called Baldwins homosexuality a sickness and described him as a self-hating black man for his interest in white literary models.

Baldwin was hard for the liberal consensus or black establishment to embrace: He dismissed the Kennedys civil rights efforts, attacked the narrowness of mainstream black Christian culture, and sharply criticized Wrights work. In Native Song Stew compares it to an aspiring young rapper put on the map by Kanye West suddenly turning on his mentor.

Baldwin admired many artists who werent African American, which did not endear him to the Black Panthers. He penned an insightful profile of Bergman (The Northern Protestant) for Esquire in the early 60s, and later wrote about his friendship with Norman Mailer. When Gates, as a young man, visited Baldwin in the South of France in the early 70s, he was amazed to see a whole shelf of books by or about Henry James. His prose was Jamesian, the scholar says. Henry James and the King James Bible. Id just write down his sentences because I liked the sound of them.

Often, though, he was buried by respectful neglect. It would have been easy to earn a robust literary or historical education in the 1980s or 90s and not read a single work of Baldwins. Partly, it was because his greatest achievements were with essays rather than novels, and because his irony and nuance could be difficult to hear over the straightforward rage of Wrights Black Boy and Native Son, or the sheer brilliance of Ellisons Invisible Man. Baldwin was, for a long time, out of fashion.

Moonlight director Jenkins studied black literature at Florida State University without reading Baldwin at all, and found The Fire Next Time only because a friend mentioned his work. Giovannis Room, he says, was the first queer novel I ever read, and one of the first black novels as well. It was like two doors being kicked down at once.

But between Coates and an anthology from August called The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, which includes pieces by Claudia Rankine and Isabel Wilkerson, its been hard to miss his reemergence.

Any time someone uses the term Baldwinesque I think of shockingly articulate and flamboyant, says Stew, whose band the Negro Problem once a highlight of L.A.s indie rock scene took its name from a phrase Baldwin used ironically in Notes of a Native Son.

We speak his language today, Stew says. We use his ideas to navigate the contemporary terrain. A guy can't get any more relevant than that.

calendar@latimes.com

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30 years after his death, James Baldwin is having a new pop culture moment - Los Angeles Times

Every once in a while an art exhibition seems to so perfectly tap into the nations zeitgeist that it takes on a kind of urgency. Occupancies, the ambitious new show currently on view at three BU galleries, is such a show.

Displaying the work of 22 emerging and mid-career artists, the show, at the 808 Gallery, the Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery, and the Annex, explores the ways individual and collective bodies create, negotiate, and inhabit space. The physical body takes on a kind of heightened political weight here, as the artists use it to express ideas about visibilityor the lack of visibility. The politically and sexually charged exhibition packs a wallop.

The very titleOccupanciesconnotes images of direct action and nonviolent resistance: think the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011, the recent Black Lives Matter protests, this years womens marches in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere, and the countless rallies protesting the Trump immigration ban.

Occupy can mean many different things, says Lynne Cooney, (GRS10,16), artistic director of the Boston University Art Galleries, who curated the show with Kimber Chewning (GRS17). We were interested in the different real and symbolic dimensions of the term. The exhibition is not really about protest movements, but alludes to acts of protest in some of the works.

Cooney says the exhibition, which includes painting, photography, sculpture, video, and mixed media, asks whether certain individuals have different kinds of access to public and private spaces than others and the various ways bodies read in different spaces. From these questions, the exhibition considers how creating and inhabiting space or making oneself visible is in itself a form of resistance, she says.

Occupancies is notable for being the first exhibition to be held concurrently in both the 808 and the Stone Galleries, as well as the Annex. We wanted the show to feel as full as possible, taking up all of our gallery spaces and presenting a multitude of different bodies and mediums, Cooney says. There are so many mediums and methods artists are working in, and we wanted to represent them as best as possible.

Not the Nightmare, Not the Scream, Just the Loving Human Dreamof Peace, the Ever-flowing Stream, Bring the Message Home, gouache and graphite on tea-stained paper, by Ellen Lesperance. Courtesy of Isabella Hutchinson. On view at the Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery.

The show abounds with images of resistance that are by turns personal, poignant, and urgent. At the Stone Gallery, the viewer encounters artists who engage with the absent body. For example, a series of drawings by Ellen Lesperance was inspired by sweaters worn by female activists who committed their lives to fight for womens rights. Her geometric works on paper, which straddle figuration and abstraction, address the invisibility of female protesters.

Similarly, in Jonah Groeneboers multichannel sound installation Double Mouth Feedback, 2015,a circle of six speakers mounted on scaffolds serves as a stand-in for corporeal bodies. The artist recorded the voices of 37 people providing vocal responses to a series of prompts, like Make a genderless sound, or Make the sound of your gender yesterday. The varying frequencies and pitches have been woven together to collectively imagine a new language freed from current rigid biases about genderand the sound produced is haunting.

If the Stone Gallery focuses on the absent body, the works on display at the 808 Gallery more specifically addresses the performative body and the archival body and historical memory. Ramiro Gomezs Laborers at Lunch, 2015, is a tribute to the workforcelargely Hispanicof the more affluent Los Angeles neighborhoods, people too often rendered invisible. Gomez presents the laborers as cardboard cutouts, surrounded by objects from the real worldcoolers, thermoses, Tupperware containers, a lone paint can. Their faces are nearly featurelessparticularly their eyesunderscoring the way society ignores these laborers. Similarly, the arresting painting Blue Evening, 2015, borrows heavily from David Hockneys famous California pool paintings. Like Hockneys work, Gomezs painting features heavily saturated color. But here, Hockneys affluent Caucasian swimmers and homeowners have been replaced by a dark-complexioned pool cleaner, again presented as nearly featureless to stress how certain segments of the population are ignored.

Laborers at Lunch, 2015, mixed media installation, by Ramiro Gomez. Courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery. On view at the 808 Gallery.

Also at the 808 Gallery are self-portraits by a number of artists using their naked bodies to make a political statement. Internationally acclaimed artist Shen Wei, based in Shanghai and New York, says his photographs allow him to explore his sense of security through understanding the tension between freedom and boundaries, each image at once a moment of introspection and rebellion. By capturing the juxtaposition of his body to his environment, he explores questions of confidence and sensualitycharacteristics, the show notes, that are often not attributed to Asian males.

Photographer Nona Faustine uses her body as a conduit to the past. In a triptych of self-portraits shot outside the Lefferts House in Brooklyn, N.Y.a site that has deep associations with the slave tradethe African American artists half-naked torso becomes an act of solidarity with women who were objectified and commodified through slavery.

Ann Hirschs mixed media installation horneylilfeminist, 2015, a series of 14 videos shown on simultaneous monitors, centers around female desire. While many of the videos focus on self-pleasure, mimicking the how-to format popularized by YouTube, others reflect the artists ambivalence about participating in the kind of submissive female roles promoted by pornography. (A sign warns viewers that the videos contain adult content.)

Sideline, 2017, mixed media installation (paint, tape), by Marlon Forrester. Courtesy of the artist. On view at the 808 Gallery.

Other works in the 808 Gallery consider the body in more abstract terms. For example, Indira Allegras digital installation Blackout weaves testimonials from the families of victims of police violence with twill, the fabric used to manufacture police uniforms, to examine the ways certain narratives are obscured while others arent. And then theres Marlon Forresters Sideline, 2017, a mixed media installation that uses the conceptual and geometric frameworks of a basketball court to examine ideas about race. The work evolves over time, with visitors invited to add a mark, shape, or some kind of form that, the accompanying text notes, responds to boundaries or constraints, real or imagined, that impose or inform racist stereotypes. A stack of rolls of masking tape, along with scissors and a ruler, are stacked on a table. Visitors are asked to construct some artistic symbol that addresses the question: What does resistance and community mean when your body is a tool?

Cooney acknowledges that the showwhich she and Chewning began planning more than a year agohas taken on a heightened meaning with todays changing political climate. In the wake of recent political events in the United States, we feel it is more important than ever to provide space for underrepresented individuals to assert themselves, she says. Making art is a way for underrepresented people to be seen and acknowledged, and our hope is viewers will come away from the show considering their own positions and with a desire to make room for others.

A special symposium tied to the exhibition, Making Room: Practicing Feminisms Today, will be held tomorrow at the 808 Gallery from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., free and open to the public (RSVP below). It will consist of a roundtable on gender and equity in higher education, and two panels, The Archival Body and the Feminist Voice, and Intersectional Feminisms.

Occupancies is at the 808 Gallery, 808 Commonwealth Ave., and at the Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery and Annex, 855 Commonwealth Ave., through March 26. Gallery hours: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m., Thursday, noon to 8 p.m., closed Monday. The exhibition is free and open to the public.

The symposium Making Room: Practicing Feminisms Today is tomorrow, Saturday, February 28, from 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the 808 Gallery. Find more information about the three panels here. The event is free and open to the public, but space is limited, so please RSVP in advance here. The panels will be followed by a community lunch and a group discussion.

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Occupancies Explores the World of Our Bodies - BU Today