I saw the trailer for this just a few days ago (it looked good!) when I was at IFC to see what was a disappointing film (Certified Copy), so when I found out it was premiering today- I bought myself a ticket for the evening screening which included a Q&A with Director Robin Hessman.

It was so fascinating– kids raised under communism, the iron curtain falls and begin to piece together reality while at the same time coming of age. My Perestroika was engaging the whole way through, where documentaries usually feel clinical to me. This had humor, an intrinsically engaging subject matter, momentum, a very nicely laid out structure, and intimacy. You feel like you’re hearing from people you who are your friends (which while usually a goal, not so many directors accomplish very well). This isn’t a film about drama or disaster and victims, it’s about a mass cultural movement to enlightenment and being able to laugh at the world around you.

Synopsis from IFC:

Director in person Wed at 8:20, Thu at 6:20 and 8:20, Fri-Sat at 8:20!

This is the story of five ordinary Russians living in extraordinary times — from sheltered Soviet childhood, to the collapse of the USSR in their teenage years, to the constantly shifting political landscape of post-Soviet Russia. Weaving interviews of the one-time classmates together with rare home movie footage from the ’70s and ’80s and official Soviet propaganda films, MY PERESTROIKA paints a complex picture of the dreams and disillusionment of those raised behind the Iron Curtain.

NR, 88 Minutes, In Russian with English subtitles
USA/UK
Official Website: http://myperestroika.com

***

Though while it certainly warms me up to Russian culture, unfortunately the widespread xenophobia against Asians and people from the Caucuses will probably keep me from going there anytime in the near future.

I had a memorable, if not historic night, at tonight’s monthly Queer/Art/Film event at IFC put on by Butt magazine’s Adam Baran & Ira Sachs. I really wanted to see this man in real life- especially after seeing Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus, and having met and done a portrait of Bruce Benderson for EastVillageBoys who worked on putting the Taschen book together of Bidgood’s photography, I really wanted to see this man in real life. What happens at this monthly event is a queer director presents a film that has inspired them, and does a short q&a afterward about their own work and how the film influenced them.

The Thief of Bagdad had beautiful color, and fantastical imagery and set design that doesn’t appear in movies today. Bidgood argues that this is a result of overinformation, so we are left with facts which while intended to be enlightening can also confine ones mind from wild and beautiful imaginations that might otherwise exist. We know what the middle east (Arabia) looks like now, and most places of the world.. so there’s less wonderment of that magical place far away from here where tall tales grow.

Our standards of cinema have also changed, seeing the special effects when the movie was first released were unlike anything people had seen, and thus very believable.. where our eyes now have adapted to different standards and seeing it today looks a bit more artificial but still as enjoyable.

Bidgood is one sure quirky guy.. very entertaining. It was inspiring in a way to hear from a guy who’s been at it for so long and though beaten down time and again- and dirt poor, hasn’t given up. What screw is loose that I don’t have that kind of resolve?

If you don’t know the story of the making of Pink Narcissus.. here is the introduction of Bidgood’d interview with BUTT Magazine:

“It was a hot June morning in New York when after a long hike up an endless flight of stairs, I met the photographer and filmmaker James Bidgood. Famous for his ethereal photography of beautiful young men in the 1960s, James Bidgood directed, produced and wrote the iconic 1971 film Pink Narcissus, starring Bobby Kendall. Nearly all of the film was shot in Mr. Bidgood’s Hell’s Kitchen apartment between 1963 and 1971 where he lived within the sets he built. Before the film reached completion, it was taken from him by investors and edited without his involvement, creating something Bidgood says he couldn’t even follow himself or stay awake through. Devastated after having spent the past seven years of his life making the film, he refused to sign his name to the project and for years it was credited to ‘Anonymous’, which led many to think that perhaps Andy Warhol was behind it. When I arrived at his apartment, Mr. Bidgood asked the first question.”
–[Read full interview here]

Here’s what’s coming up next:
IFC Queer/Art/Film Schedule

I saw this tonight with the director doing a Q&A afterward. Beautifully shot, touching on a lot of topics.. grim reality leaves you feeling a bit unsettled.

Showing until Thursday September 9th at IFC!
http://www.ifccenter.com/films/last-train-home/

Trailer:

Synopsis:

Every spring in China, 130 million workers return home for New Year’s–the world’s largest migration, an epic spectacle of a modern country tied to a rural past. The Zhangs have embarked on this annual trek for almost two decades, visiting parents and, like many, the children they left behind for grueling factory jobs. The absences stretch on, and these yearly reunions grow strained to the breaking point, as revealed in this intimate and starkly beautiful observation of one fractured family–and the human cost of China’s economic miracle. From the producers of Up the Yangtze.
NR, 85 Minutes, In Mandarin with English subtitles.
Canada/China/UK, 2010
Official Website: zeitgeistfilms.com

NY Times Review: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/movies/29home.html?_r=1&ref=movies

Welcome to the dream world. One of my best friends turned me onto Sergei Parajanov. We had watched The Legend of Suram Fortress & Ashik Kerib. I was completely speechless and in shock on the first viewing. It hit really far inside my sub/unconscious.

The Color Of Pomegranates is probably Parajanov’s most known film. It’s currently playing at Anthology Film Archive in the East Village
Wednesday July 14, 2010 at 9:15pm & Saturday, July 17, 2010 at 7:15pm

http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/calendar?view=list&month=07&year=2010#showing-36101

Film Notes from Anthology’s website:

The powerful words of 17th-century poet Arutuin Sayadian, also known as “Sayat Nova” (“King of Siam”) are magnificently captured in this visual pastiche which is both a stylized biography and a tribute to his work. Charted into eight sections of his life from childhood to death, the film is a series of symbolically rich, almost hallucinatory scenes. This baroque masterpiece was banned in the Soviet Union for its religious sentiment and nonconformity to “Socialist realism.” Paradjanov, a tirelessly outspoken campaigner for human rights, was convicted on a number of trumped-up charges and sentenced to five years of hard labor in the gulag. A wave of protest from the international film community led to his release in 1978.

Watch below via google video:

Additional info from Kino.com:

The Legend Of Suram Fortress
Director: Sergei Paradjanov
Country: Russia | USSR
Year: 1985
Paradjanov’s first film after more than a decade of persecution and imprisonment is based on an ancient Georgian legend about unrequitted love. Armenia. 1985. 78 mins. Color. Georgian w/English Subtitles.

(The Legend of Suram Fortress) – Based on an ancient legend, this dazzling film by visionary director Sergei Paradjanov (Shadows Of Our Forgotten Ancestors) is a surreal ode to Georgian warriors throughout the ages who died for their country. Repeated efforts by the Georgian people to construct a defensive stronghold continually fail. The building collapses until a fortune teller remembers an old prophecy that the son of her erstwhile lover must be bricked up alive in order for the fortress to stand. The young man is faced with the prospect of sacrificing himself to save his country.
Ashik Kerib
Director: Sergei Paradjanov
Country: Russia | USSR
Year: 1988
This shimmering spectacle resembles a medieval manuscript brought to life in its tale of a wandering minstrel in search of his lost love. Armenia. 1988. 78 mins. Color. Russian w/ English subtitles.

(Ashik Kerib) – From Sergei Paradjanov (The Legend of Suram Fortress, Shadows Of Our Forgotten Ancestors) one of the most acclaimed experimental directors of the Soviet cinema, comes Ashik Kerib, a 19th Century romantic tale evocatively brought to life.

In recounting Lermontov’s fable of a wandering minstrel trying to earn enough money to marry the girl he loves, Paradjanov dispenses with conventional storytelling devices in order to present a boldly unique cinematic experience. Glorious tableaux, exquisitely composed, choreographed and photographed, are combined with intertitles, images of early Russian artwork and a haunting blend of traditional and contemporary musical forms, to create an enthralling and utterly unforgettable film.

I saw this tonight and I think that if you’re a New Yorker, this is an important film. For school education, I think it’s not enough to just talk about the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement; this should be included alongside the others.

The current and upcoming generations of gay teenagers have a unique experience – gay as a defined identity, and sans the religious right, without the imminent pandemic danger it’s earlier generations of youth experienced. The gay experience now is affected by consumerism (pop culture, blog culture), consuming the various aspects to build the identity. For whatever reason, if it’s that AIDS doesn’t phase kids as a deathly reality anymore, HIV infection statistics among youths have started climbing up in correlation with the popularity of bareback (condomless) porn. The AIDS epidemic of the 80′s is less tangible a reality and more a story– the tangible evidence of its destructiveness and the blind eye politicians (the president) and government agencies turned towards addressing the epidemic– wiped out with the generation that endured it.

Life as a gay person in the lower and middle classes pre-gay rights movement (of which the Stonewall Uprising in June of 1969 was the start) is less tangible a reality and more a story as well. A reality still for those trapped in insular environments, but for the masses – at least on the surface level due to a bit of attention in the entertainment media- the cultural temperature appears safe. I think it’s easy to feel a bit apathetic now – the battle is off the streets and in courtrooms. It’s why psychologists have studied internalized racism– when it goes guerilla, it’s much harder to address.

The film does a nice job of recounting the times and the perspective of what it was like then for the lower-middle class gay. The anti-gay propaganda doled out in classrooms to children is really horrifying and I’m curious what damaging effects it’s had on those youth. I love the imagery of drag queens in full garb fighting the policemen – they were the ones who were fighting back that night, perhaps that’s a lesser known fact. Some of the more violent aspects were mentioned only in passing – how gays were beaten, killed, and dumped in rivers; not just by police smashing your head in but by suburban gangsters who drove into manhattan and would pull you into their car to murder you. It was said the police turned a blind eye to the killings of gays and not bother to conduct an inspection unless you were of an upper class family. A friend of a friend was a victim of one of these abductions where some gangsters broke a beer bottle in half and ground it in circles around the victim’s eye socket, removing his eye and pulverizing his eye socket so only a large gaping hole in the head remained. Then they took the broken bottle and went to work on the stomach.

Coming from the west coast, it was nice to have some way to experience the Stonewall Uprising through interviews and re-creations. The turning point in the West Coast’s history of gay activism comes with the 1978 assassination of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay public official in active office. This was our Stonewall – which I read about in The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk while I was attending Berkeley.

The first time I came to New York in early 2004, I went in search of the Stonewall.. it was snowing and windy, I had no idea where I was going, and I had spent the day trying to walk around the city with frozen hands. I ended up at some club, I’m not sure if it was the Stonewall though..
I haven’t tried to find the Stonewall since then, for no real reason. However, it was nice to see the film just a few blocks from where it took place. I guess that’s nice about watching movies about New York in New York- Manhattan is small and usually some scene you’re watching will be just down the street of where you are. That’s more real that reality TV.

Synopsis from Film Forum:

http://www.filmforum.org/films/stonewall.html

“It was the Rosa Parks moment,” says one man. June 28, 1969: NYC police raid a Greenwich Village Mafia-run gay bar, The Stonewall Inn. For the first time, patrons refuse to be led into paddy wagons, setting off a 3-day riot that launches the Gay Rights Movement. Told by Stonewall patrons, Village Voice reporters and the cop who led the raid, STONEWALL UPRISING compellingly recalls the bad old days when psychoanalysts equated homosexuality with mental illness and advised aversion therapy, and even lobotomies; public service announcements warned youngsters against predatory homosexuals; and police entrapment was rampant. A treasure-trove of archival footage gives life to this all-too-recent reality, a time when Mike Wallace announced on a 1966 CBS Reports: “The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous. He is not interested in, nor capable of, a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage.” At the height of this oppression, the cops raid Stonewall, triggering nights of pandemonium with tear gas, billy clubs and a small army of tactical police. The rest is history.

USA • 2010 • 82 MINUTES • FIRST RUN FEATURES

Review on IMDB

Description on the Angelika Site

Seriously some of the best $12.50 I’ve spent in a long time. It’s so thorough, tense, and complex in a easy masterful way. By the same director of The Beat That My Heart Skipped. Don’t watch the trailer (I think the trailers for this movie cheapen it) because the strength is not in a unique storyline but in the shifting intra/interpersonal relations which can’t be spliced into dramatic clips. Just go and see it by yourself or with friends.

I absorb heavy movies best when I see them alone, so afterward I can wander out of the theater and still be in that world. I knew it’d be a treat after the movie because I’d still be in a cinematic daydream: I’ve never felt rain could be beautiful, until I saw it falling in front of a taxi’s headlights while waiting to cross the street to get on the train. And the train as well, I knew I’d see it in a much grittier way.

One of the things I like when a film is successful is that I stop seeing through my own eyes. You stop being self-conscious (in the literal breakdown of that word), and for a while until you or someone snaps you out of it- you can view the world actively as if through the eyes and approach of a different mindset. The best part is.. no mind-altering substances needed or trauma in your actual life putting you into a haze. At most, a meditative state.

So good!

http://www.filmforum.org/films/redshoes.html

I went to the well-curated arts performance venue The Kitchen for a night put on by Bidoun (biduon.com), a middle eastern arts magazine. In one of the sections, they showed this 7 minute postscript (I’ve posted that above).. and clips of “The Lover’s Wind” by filmmaker Albert Lamorisse (1922-1970). Lamorrisse is most known for The Red Balloon, 1956.

After the program I realized the person I had asked to watch over my bike because I forgot my lock was actually Matthew, one of The Kitchen’s curators.. who I’d met through friends a while back.

Watch both here: http://ubu.com/film/lamorisse.html

My friend Richard invited me to see Joan of Arc of Mongolia (1989) Sunday evening, with Q&A afterward by Ottinger herself! The plot focuses on eclectic female passengers aboard a Trans-Mongolian rail, but it’s so strange that it first starts off as a hypothetical adventure, but then transforms into an actual cultural adventure for all parties involved (the film’s characters, the actors, and the audience as well). I’m sure you’d enjoy the smart character roles, how smartly it was made, and how humorous it is. The first half is filmed in Berlin at a studio (the visual solutions for this are quite amazing), and the second half is filmed as an adventure documentary / anthropological study in Mongolia – it was both a conceptual and cultural delight to watch.

And the languages! Mandarin, Russian, Mongolian, French, German, English. So involved and international.

The film leaves you with a lot of curiosity of how it was done and the experience of filming it, so it was pretty great to have Ottinger there to answer our questions. (I don’t know where else you can catch this film though..)

On Monday, I sat through a marathon run of her films. There’s a marked difference between Joan of Arc and the rest of her work from what I’ve seen. ‘The Korean Wedding Chest’ is a good neutral documentary, unless you’re Asian and you’ve seen the wedding banquet process enough times over; though the opening scenes of the temples were quite nice. Anthology threw in a bonus short film called Still Moving.. and that was honestly horrible and *really* hard to sit through. Not only did it go on forever with no new insight, it gave me a headache and then kicked me while I was down with 3 minutes of costumed machine gun firing.

Lastly, I saw ‘Ticket of No Return’ which is about lesbianeroticism (which was accompanied with gestured man-hating) and alcoholism. Some points were visually clever: when she took from ‘Suspiria’, and the Fellini inspired scene. Also to note, it seems that David Lynch was looking to Ottinger when making his films. Stylistically so, but also the imagery of a midget opening the curtains.. taken from signature Ottinger. But after the short, and then this.. I could only handle 40 minutes.

For More:

• Anthology’s Complete Schedule: http://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org/schedule/
• Ulrike Ottinger Official Website