Richard Linklater, NYC, 5/16/06

In the timeless landscape of the Messinia region of Greece, Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke), drive and walk and talk (and talk) about their lives and love for each other and how things change.

Director Richard Linklater’s wonderful “Before Midnight” (the third film in the series that began with “Before Sunrise”), rejoins Celine and Jesse nine years after he–it’s now obvious–missed his plane home from Paris in “Before Sunset.”   And what’s also obvious is that Jesse and Celine are a couple with seven-year-old twin daughters.

Brought up to speed with pitch-perfect, often very funny dialog (a hallmark of the “Before” films), we learn that Jesse is now a successful novelist at work on his fourth book and Celine, his somewhat reluctant muse, is an environmentalist on the verge of a quantum leap in her career.

The family is nearing the end of an idyllic vacation (which also included Jesse’s son from his first marriage, Hank, who has just flown back to Chicago) at a writer’s retreat, the bucolic home of their host, an older expat writer, Patrick.

At a leisurely lunch in one of the villa’s “outdoor rooms”–the proceedings are magazine-spread worthy–with Patrick and his Greek friends who have embraced the family, Celine, feeling tension with with Jesse, tries, without success, to decline a gift from Stefanos and Ariadne, a night for just the two of them at a luxurious hotel on the Ionian Sea (with a bottle of wine and a couples’ massage), babysitting provided at Patrick’s place.  (An aside: Ariadne is played by one of the film’s co-producers, director Athina Rachel Tsangari, whose perceptive film, “Attenberg,” released in New York in 2012, is a must-see.)

Jesse and Celine’s relationship in the two earlier films–one night on a train and in Vienna (in their 20s), one day in Paris (in their 30s)–was all potential, and as such, purely and highly romantic.   In “Before Midnight,” they’ve been together for nine years and while their love has deepened, it has also changed, worked on by the forces of  time and everyday life and it’s not without fissures, opened by unresolved grievances.

Sparring mixes with light-hearted conversation on the walk through a glorious landscape to the hotel but metamorphoses into a conflagration, sparked, as they settle into the room, by a small misunderstanding, fueled by a relationship’s worth of misunderstandings, differences and fears.  The dialog is so spot on, it’s squirm-inducing.

Celine, as she furiously exits the room says, “It’s simple.  I don’t think I love you anymore.”  Jesse follows her outside to a waterside table and with his characteristic charm, spins a story of a time traveler returned from visiting with Celine’s octogenarian self.  Unsure if they’ll reconcile he says, “If you want true love, this is it.”

I don’t know if the “Before” films will continue on, like a mini, fictional “7 Up,” and if we’re scheduled to check in again with Jesse and Celine in nine or so years, but the series (and I choose not to say trilogy, leaving things open-ended) outs me as a romantic and I know they’ll still be together, worrying about where the twins will attend college.

–

The first time I photographed Richard Linklater (using shutter drag–colloquially, flash and blur), it was in my studio and his now seminal independent feature, “Slacker,” was about to be released.  He was smart, fun to meet and shoot, and we talked about films and photography.  After I finished shooting, he looked at my photography book collection (even then I had shelves of interesting volumes), sitting on the  small black pleather sofa (a rough copy of an Arne Jacobsen) that I had bought at a stoop sale on Renwick St. and awkwardly carried home.  Time passed.  My assistant said, “I think he likes you.”  I replied, “Yes, well enough–but not like that.  You’ll understand when you see ‘Slacker.’ ”  Eventually someone from Sony Classics called looking for Richard and asked me to send him back uptown to their offices.

Fifteen years later, I shot Richard again, in a hotel, for an article in MovieMaker.  He remembered the shoot at my studio, which surprised me–he’d been photographed innumerable times since.  But more amazing, he remembered all the books he’d paged through and that when he had asked who was the last person I’d shot before him, I had answered Gerard Depardieu.  I too have a good memory but I was awed by his ability and said, “You’re a bad person to have a disagreement with–you’ll remember every prior event and conversation and even if you didn’t, you could make it up and anyone familiar with your superhero total recall would believe you.”

“Before Midnight” will open Friday, May 24 in New York at the Angelika Film Center and AMC Lincoln Square 13 and expand nationally in June.

Richard Linklater, NYC, 3/26/91

Jerry Schatzberg, NYC, 5/10/13

Two drifters with dim prospects meet on an empty western road (complete with tumbleweed) and throw in together in Jerry Schartzberg‘s great (and not well-enough known) 1973 Palme d’Or winner, “Scarecrow.”

A road movie that in many ways created a template for others that followed (Max materializes out of a remote landscape–ditto, Harry Dean Stanton in “Paris, Texas;” scenes play out on lonesome highways and in sad cafes; beleaguered characters look for love or one last chance), “Scarecrow” chronicles the unlikely friendship between Max (Gene Hackman), self-described “meanest SOB alive,” recently released from prison, and newly discharged sailor, sweet-natured, laughter-loving Francis (Al Pacino).  Max renames him Lion .

Neither man is part of the era’s counterculture and yearns for his piece of the  conventional American dream.  Max, sporting an odd layered look, never removing a collegiate letter sweater, is headed for his promised land, Pittsburgh, where he intends to become a business owner, running a car wash.   Francis is determined to reach Detroit, hoping to restart a life with his ex and the child he’s never met.  He carries a small lamp in a white box with a red bow–it’s a unisex gift, he doesn’t know if he has a son or daughter.  Like Diogenes searching in the sunlit streets of Athens for an honest man, Francis is looking for an honest break.  But uncertain of the welcome he’ll receive, he accepts Max’s offer of a partnership in Pennsylvania.

After a detour to visit Max’s sister in Denver, which ends in a going away party brawl, the two are delayed for a month in a prison work camp.  Upon their release, in a spectacular-looking boxing-themed bar, Max, with his short fuse about to blow again, chooses, as he sees Francis exiting, to forgo fighting and instead performs an amazing impromptu striptease.  Adhering to Francis’ way of getting by, he leaves his would be assailant and the bar’s patrons laughing.

Events in Detroit sink Francis and he is committed to a psychiatric hospital.  Max who earlier in the film pronounced, “I don’t trust anyone, I don’t love anyone” now begs a mute and motionless Francis to come with him, “I can’t do it alone.”  At the bus station, leaving for Pittsburgh, Max scrapes together the cash for a round-trip ticket.

“Scarecrow” will open at Film Forum on Friday, May 17 for a one-week run.  Director Jerry Schatzberg will introduce the 7:30 pm show on opening night with a Q&A to follow the screening.

11/22/11: Ellen, attentive and kind, head RN at the nursing home said, “Your father is passing.”  I thought, but didn’t say, “Failing, actually,” not sure if a pun was appropriate.

We moved Daddy to Calvary Hospital (in the Bronx not far where he’d started 87 years earlier), which for several months had been providing him with hospice care–nurses and social workers–at the nursing home.

The young, perceptive Orthodox rabbi–also sent to us by the wonderful Catholic hospice and whom my father had surprisingly accepted and befriended–met us there, sprinting down the hall with a collectible-looking crucifix in his hand, pleased to have removed it from my father’s room in such a timely manner.  Daddy, each day more shrunken and silent, was dead a week later, in the very early morning on 11/29/11.

When the phone call came, I thought who will call me “my razzle dazzle” now?  Who will grab my hand when we cross a street in New York and when challenged, “I’m a grown woman, my skill set encompasses doing this by myself, how do you think I manage when you’re not here?” reply, “I just choose not to think about it.”

My sister and I spent two days almost every week last winter in our parents’ small suburban house, sorting for what was precious in their 50+-year accumulation, and throwing out the seemingly endless material debris of of their lives, donating what we could.  It was tedious, sad and dusty work.

The house, where we had grown up was cold, smelled damp.  The basement, a tight maze, was choked with small electronic samples, expired tuna, tool and toys, clothes from nearly every decade of the 20th century and black garbage bags filled with fabric, taken from our super seamstress grandmother’s apartment–and immediately forgotten–when she died in the 70s.

Under a pile of pastel pedal pushers (the forerunner of capris), we found a homemade photo/scrapbook of the early years of their marriage (of course they took vacations before we were born but who knew they skied; standing with pride in front of a big bomb of a second-hand Chevy, their first car; and a section headline: “My Beautiful Persian”–we joked that Mommy had dated a handsome Iranian but knew we’d turn the page to see a picture of her in her curly lamb coat, young and pretty with bangs and straight chin-length hair).  And my white Schwinn bicycle emerged from behind metal filing cabinets.

Mommy had died on July 16, 2003 but her things remained in the bedroom closet and on and in the big dresser and desk and stuffed in plastic bags in piles on the floor.  We meant to keep a tally of her miniature clocks but lost count.  And then there were the flashlights and mountains of business cards from businesses undoubtedly extinct and everywhere paper plates, Daddy’s favorite notepad, covered with his unmistakable writing: all caps.

In the free storage facility that was my childhood bedroom, I found souvenirs of a life so long ago it seems like a dream.  Unlike many Americans families, mine stayed put in the starter home, didn’t renovate, redecorate or repurpose the children’s rooms and things I might have carelessly shed decades earlier–at 22 there’s no interest in history, nostalgia is corny, life is all out in front–were safe: Abby’s letters, written to me when I was in Binghamton and a photo of her–she’s 16, on the porch in Short Beach wearing an Irish sweater Jean made and with two circular pretzels taking the place of her round-rimmed glasses; the “Hatari” book Grandma bought me at the Bronx movie palace before the show; my high school year book; the manual–the first of many I’ve skimmed, at most–for my first camera, a Pentax Spotmatic.

In a small jewelry box from India, liberated, as we then said, from a mall store by my high school boyfriend, I found the silver bracelet I’d long resigned myself to having inexplicably lost, which had been given to me by  the great poet, Ai (Florence Anthony), an amulet for my junior year poetry reading.

And in big boxes holding yet more electronic samples, I unearthed  a flat pink box, full of stamps not yet installed in the album, with the red logo of a (now shuttered) upscale New York department store, Russeks, founded by Diane Arbus’ family.

The evergreen planted too close as a sapling and which grew to dwarf the house, leaning big branches on the roof, was cut down last spring.  Another early addition to Mommy’s mini aboretum, the  silver birch, succumbed to a borer, as they do, no older than 30, but the red maple continues to thrive and the forsythia, recovering from having lived in the evergreen’s shadow, bloomed profusely last month.

We had intended to seek relief by going out for lunch at least once each week but the quality of the restaurants was what it was when we had lived there, the same Chinese restaurant, the same pizza parlor across from our high school–less of a draw if you hadn’t cut geometry or gym to grab a slice.  We tried the a new Subway once.  The restaurant where Gary had worked, the Jolly Ox, home of big meat (unappealing to us now as then) but a decent salad bar, had become a funeral home.

So twice a week Babette picked up coffee from her neighborhood barista, although three Dunkin’ Donuts are a quick drive from the house–DD’s brew is only for the desperate, like a traveler touring Civil War battlefields in the south.  And she selected two paninis from her local modern sandwich place and we developed a routine–cutting them in thirds and each day eating what we could.

We accepted an offer on our parents’ house in March.  A few days ago we were notified of the date of the imminent closing, provoking a small wave of grief.  But I feel less sad looking at the pictures of the house, front yard and back, now than I thought I would and it’s not just because a year or so has elapsed.  The act of choosing where the frame goes gives order to all kinds of disarray.

Ray Harryhausen

there was Ray Harryhausen, who died in London on Tuesday at 92.   The original genius of special effects and stop-motion animation, Harryhausen famously created the fantasy sequences in movies including “Jason and the Argonauts,” “Clash of the Titans,” “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms” and “One Million Years B.C.,” using a process he created, Dynamation, shooting miniatures he had built against a rear-projection screen.

In the Hollywood Reporter, Dennis Muren, eight-time Oscar winner and creative director at Industrial Light + Magic, said, “For those of us who admired Ray or knew him personally, it is a sad, sad day, one that we hoped would never come. We lost a remarkable man, a lone wolf, a brilliant artist and a mentor for three generations of filmmakers. He is a big reason we are all here and although he will be missed dearly his work will continue to inspire generations to come.”

I had had very few portrait (or any other photo) assignments when the Soho News sent me to photograph Ray Harryhausen at the Plaza (and I’d never been in a suite–or even a regular room at that storied hotel).  I was gleeful to meet him (his movies had made a big impression on me when I was a kid) and delirious when he let me hold two of his “Titans” miniatures.

Ray Harryhausen

Ulrich Seidl, NYC, 042613

Austrian auteur/provocateur Ulrich Seidl’s new films, his “Paradise” trilogy, reveal how Teresa (Margarethe Tiesel–in a fearless performance, really), her Catholic missionary sister, Anna Maria (Maria Hofstätter), and her overweight 13-year-old daughter, Melanie (Melanie Lenz), spent their (separate) summer vacations.  And while the proceeding are serious, Seidl’s strategy also involves humor–and sometimes humor so dark, it’s an embarrassment to laugh.

In “Paradise: Love” fat, 50, frumpy Teresa is first seen standing serenely on the sidelines, after the intense opening sequence: mentally handicapped, mostly young adults, in bumper cars, tongues drooping from slack mouths, slamming into each other.  The assumption is Teresa works with the group.

After dropping Melanie off with her sister, Teresa travels to Kenya for a sex holiday, hoping for rejuvenation with the young black Beach Boys who peddle trinkets and boat rides but mostly themselves to western Sugar Mamas.

Teresa (and friends) eagerly strip down–sundresses, bikinis, naked.  But unlike the opening bumper cars shot, which maybe crosses the line into gratuitous shock value, the shock of unlovely middle-aged big bodies makes Seidl’s point.

Citing Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek, Seidl says, “women looking for a man who don‘t correspond to standard ideals of beauty have low market value.  So they look for sexual fulfillment, and also love, elsewhere; in this case, with black men in Africa.”  These middle-aged sex tourists aren’t Charlotte Rampling (yeah, she’s “of a certain age” too but the regular categories don’t apply) in Laurent Cantet’s “Heading South” (2005).

But while “hakuna matata” is on everyone’s lips–the Europeans are taught the phrase (“no worries”) as they exit the bus as it arrives at the resort, Teresa’s diversion is no cheery night at a Broadway theater.  The resort’s grounds and beach are beautiful, idyllic, but all interactions between the Sugar Mamas and Beach Boys are ultimately about money–tainted, ugly, as who’s exploiting and humiliating whom seesaws back and forth.

“Paradise: Love” opens today at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, followed by the theatrical release of “Paradise: Faith” in the summer of 2013 and “Paradise: Hope” in the fall of 2013.

* from “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest” by Bob Dylan

Margarethe Tiesel, NYC, 4/26/13

Douglas Sirk

The first filmmaker I photographed was Douglas Sirk.  The second, Alain Resnais.  And a few hundred later (including actors, producers, writers, cinematographers, programmers and critics), the most recent, Shane Carruth.

I’d been writing brief pieces for “Voice Choices,” the weekly guide that filled The Village Voice’s centerfold and persuaded the editor, Guy Trebay (a great writer, now at the Times), to also let me shoot Sirk to accompany my paragraph or two describing an upcoming series of his films at MoMA.

I wasn’t exactly a photographer when I went to a hotel in midtown with my Nikon F2 and on-camera flash to meet Sirk.  But I was obsessed with Sirk’s films (all films, actually), melodramas exposing the social hypocrisy of 50s America, shot in gleaming black and white and later, hyperreal Technicolor.  Of  course I made several shots that referenced his signature use of mirrors.  And it had been through mirroring of a sort that I had learned of Sirk’s films, reflected back to filmgoers in the United States who were unfamiliar with his by then decades old work by Neue Deutsche Kino wunderkind Rainer Werner Fassbinder who cited Sirk as a massive, essential influence, both thematically and visually.

A new Sirk series, at BAMcinématek April 19-21, will feature four films that Sirk made with his made-for-him actor, Rock Hudson: “The Tarnished Angels,” “All That Heaven Allows,” “Written on the Wind,” and “Magnificent Obsession,” which also stars the first Mrs. Ronald Reagan, Jane Wyman (the only wife of any future American president to win an Oscar).

Also upcoming at BAMcinématek, April 16-17: two of Takeski Kitano’s ultra-violent, funny, unexpectedly emotional films, “Sonatine,” (for its 20th anniversary) and “Fireworks” (1997).

I also shot Kitano for Voice Choices and the image was used for the full-page cover–the expanded section took up more of the paper’s real estate during that era.  Like with Sirk, I photographed Kitano in a hotel (obvious why I remember the name: The Kitano– authentic, I was told, Japanese upscale) but with lots more equipment and an assistant to help set it all up.

Takeshi Kitano

Shane Carruth, NYC, 3/26/13

I don’t know what happens in Shane Carruth’s ethereally beautiful new film, “Upstream Color.”  Well, that’s not exactly accurate–I know what I think happens in this story of pigs, worms, starlings and a new couple.  Early in the viewing I realized that the film’s narrative was elusive yet powerfully hypnotic and even before the impossible orchids began showing up, very moving.

A math major in college, Carruth is what they call a septuple threat (or would, if that had ever happened before)–he wrote, directed, plays the male lead, Jeff (opposite amazing Amy Seimetz as Kris), shot, co-edited, produced and scored “Upstream Color.”   And his company, erbp, is releasing the film.

There really isn’t a comparison to be made between “The Tree of Life” and “Upstream Color,” except as a convenient shorthand to indicate sublime beauty and an unconventional approach to storytelling.  I loved the Terrence Malick film (dinosaurs and all) but even if you hated it (and the world does split up like that), risk the experience that is “Upstream Color.”

“Upstream Color” will open Friday, April 5 in New York at the IFC Center and expand with a national roll-out to follow in April and early May.  It also will be available on all digital platforms and home video on May 7.

Ousmane Sembène, NYC, 10/17/00

The great Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène’s 1992 serio-comic, “Guelwaar” examines the divisions within and pressures from without that plague his country.

“Guelwaar” opens with the report of the suspicious death of Christian leader, political activist (and less than faithful husband) Pierre Henri Thioune (known as Guelwaar, the noble one) and his funeral, halted before it begins when his body goes missing.   The film looks at religion (Guelwaar has been accidentally and disastrously interred in a Muslim cemetery), family, the role of women, politics, poverty and inequality, the residual fallout from colonialism and the ongoing rancid imperialism of the west.  And Sembène’s relentless camera closely observes gloriously patterned  traditional clothing, houses, courtyards, huts, magnificent great-girthed baobab tress–and the peculiar black on black unstructured, western-style suit worn by wannabe Frenchman, Bartélémy, Guelwaar’s elder son.

Just as it inaugurated the first New York African Film Festival, “Guelwaar” launches this year’s edition.  Co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and African Film Festival, “Looking Back, Looking Forward: 20 Years of The New York African Film Festival,” will honor the ground-breaking generation of African filmmakers (Sembène died in 2007)  while spotlighting new, younger directors working in narrative and non-fiction forms.

“I make movies with characters who takes responsibility for themselves,” Sembène told documentary filmmaker Christine Delorme.  In her interview, a rare view of the master director, “Ousmane Sembène All At Once” (2008), included in the NYAFF, he discusses the personal: his family of fisherman, his secular and Koranic education, his early trips to France, his work as a longshoreman in Marseilles and his trade union militancy; his work: ”Guelwaar” and several of his other films, his novels and painting; and the political: the importance of Africans retaining their indigenous languages (“I speak three Senegalese language, Wolof, Bambara and Pulaar”) and knowing their history (“a nation must have a memory”), the shame of the slave trade, colonialism and the Uncle Toms ruling Africa.

And in a contentious exchange, Sembène chides Delorme, “When Africans don’t understand the west, we’re savages.  When you don’t understand (us), it’s intellectual curiosity.”  But he then slyly praises western innovation, thanking “Monsieur Lumière” for “one of the very best tools to teach our history.”

Moussa Touré’s 1997 film “TGV,” which like “Guelwaar” uses absurdity and comedy to approach serious issues (and has a great soundtrack) closes the NYAFF.

Good-looking, resourceful Rambo with his unflappable assistant Dembo ferry passengers from Dakar, Senegal, to Conakry, Guinea, in TGV, his yellow, blue and white bus, named only partially in jest for France’s high-speed rail system–painted on its side: “faster than TGV, you explode.”  His latest group includes a middle-aged man, off to marry his latest additional wife, a teenager; a woman leaving her beloved husband who has taken a second wife; two competing marabouts; their assistants; a beauty (who ignores Rambo’s obvious interest); a man and his goats; and pot-smoking James.

The travelers encounter bad weather (Rambo passes out gum for the passengers to chew and then plug leaks in the roof), rutted roads, problematic passengers picked up during the journey (the recently fired Finance Minister and his haughty over-dressed and jeweled wife, and a pair of “intellectually curious” French ethnographers studying an ancient king, Aboubakary II, totally unknown to the African passengers) and a revolt by the Bassari (who capture TGV and hang onto the French academics “to get media attention” for their demands).  But they eventually reach Conkary and Rambo loads yet another group, including several women headed to a feminist convention in Dakar and turns TGV around.

The New York African Film Festival will screen at Film Society’s Walter Reade Theater  from April 3-9.   The NYAFF will also run throughout April and May at Columbia University’s Institute of African Studies, Maysles Cinema Institute and BAMcinématek.

Ousmane Sembène, NYC, 4/17/90

Tom Nozkowski, High Falls, NY

I’ve photographed many artists and innumerable exhibitions but having worked with masters at The Village Voice (Peter Schjeldahl, Jerry Saltz and art editor–and food/culture critic extraordinaire–Jeff Weinstein), I know I’m not an art critic.  (I’m not really a film critic either but having played one on this blog for a couple of years, it’s not an uncomfortable fit.)

Thomas Nozkowski is having his third exhibit at Pace, showing 21 oil paintings (most are 22″x28″) and across the street in a temporary space, nearly 50 works on paper.  His abstractions are beautiful, cartoony, mysterious, unique.  The paintings are small enough to get lost in, big enough to contain a new world.  For a better exploration of terra Tom than I can provide, there’s John Yau’s new article for Hyperallergic.

Thomas Nozkowski at Pace, 508 and 511 West 25th Street, through March 23.

“Untitled (9-26) (The Katy Kill),” 2012 (detail, Thomas Nozkowski opening, Pace, NYC, 2/22/13

Tom Nozkowski’s studio, High Falls, NY

Dan Sallitt, NYC, 6/14/12

In former film critic Dan Sallitt’s fourth feature, “The Unspeakable Act,” close teenage siblings Jackie (Tallie Medel) and Matthew (Sky Hirschkron) live with their supportive but subdued mother and older sister–an older brother is studying in Paris–in a large, remarkably tchotchke-free house on a tranquil Brooklyn street.

Jackie brashly announces (in voiceover) early in the proceedings that she’s “in love with her brother.”  It’s to bring the audience up to speed–Matthew is aware of her affection and he deals with it (until the end of the film) with bemusement and indulgence rather than outrage.  

Soft, saucer-eyed Jackie slips into sadness when Matthew leaves for Princeton.  Clinging to her unmentionable (though she’s frequently mentioned it) taboo, she fixates on her attraction to her brother as a way to forestall adulthood and its risky relationships.

Sessions sitting with her Converse sneakers on an astute therapist’s leather couch lead to fumbling in a car with a boy she meets at a party (subject line of her email to Matthew: “Defloration”) and Jackie begins to give up her impossible expectations of her brother–and herself.

But she’s not quite ready to abandon her teenage angst.  Like Matthew, fond of Jackie, the audience indulges her when she says in voiceover of her exceptionalism, “I’m not even 18 yet and I’m resigned to never being happy, pretending from morning to night that I want the same things as everyone else,” and is encouraged that she allows that her therapist’s view that her life will continue to change might be correct.

“The Unspeakable Act” will be shown on Tuesday, March 12 at 8:00 pm at the Elinor Bunim Munroe Film Center, part of Film Society’s ongoing Indie Night series.

–

I had photographed other famous people when I was assigned to shoot Pam Grier for an interview in the Arts & Lesiure section of The New York Times (which ran to coincide with the release of Quentin Tarrantino’s “Jackie Brown”).  But I’d never had an icon in my studio before.  And the irony of me telling beautiful, kickass Foxy Brown what to do (even if it was only “turn to the left,” “fling your jacket over your shoulder”) made the shoot extra fun, funny, as wonderful Pam Grier played along.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center will present “Foxy, The Complete Pam Grier,” on March 15-17.  Grier will attend several screenings and will sign her new book “Foxy My Life in Three Acts” on Saturday, March 16.

Pam Grier, NYC, 10/16/97