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      Opening Old Wounds as the Man Who Warned About the Holocaust

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      In the solo play “Remember This,” David Strathairn portrays Jan Karski, a witness to the Nazi genocide during World War II.The actor David Strathairn would rather you didn’t read this. He has his reasons.They’re not so much specific to his Off Broadway project — “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski,” the solo play he’s starring in for Theater for a New Audience — as they are rooted in the general principle of preserving some mystery for audience members who haven’t yet seen a show. He prefers to keep his art pristine.“If you have the facts before you have the emotive experience, it’s a different process,” Strathairn, 73, was saying the other day in a dressing room at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, where “Remember This” is in previews.By the time he made that point, he had been speaking for nearly an hour — about Karski, a member of the Polish Underground during World War II who warned the Allies to no avail of the Holocaust in progress, and about the play, in whose successive iterations Strathairn has portrayed Karski since 2014.Did Strathairn, then, take exception to his interview about the show even as he was giving it?“Kind of yeah,” he said, smiling behind his face mask and meaning it anyway. “I kind of do. Just, objectively speaking, I find that it diminishes the magic of the experience if they know too much coming in. They have preconceptions.”Strathairn — whose most cherished credits include the films “Nightmare Alley,” “Nomadland,” “Lincoln” and “Good Night, and Good Luck,” for which he received a best actor Academy Award nomination — also takes issue with critics who, as he put it, “lay the patient out on the table and you see every organ, every tumor.”Which doesn’t mean that Strathairn, who is currently on movie screens in an Atticus Finch-style role in “Where the Crawdads Sing” and was last seen on Broadway in 2012 opposite Jessica Chastain in “The Heiress,” is broadly anti-journalism.“There are things in the world that absolutely need to be outed, revealed, that need that transparency,” he said. “I don’t think the creative arts does.”So, a warning: Facts ahead. There’s zero chance, though, of this article spoiling everything about “Remember This,” let alone everything about Karski. There simply isn’t the space.Even if there were, Karski himself — who died in 2000 and was posthumously awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2012 — knew how abstract a thing can seem when it is imparted as a story, and how unignorably potent when it is experienced firsthand.Strathairn, left, with the play’s writers, Derek Goldman, center, and Clark Young during rehearsals for Theater for a New Audience’s production of “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski.”Emon Hassan for The New York TimesHours into “Shoah,” Claude Lanzmann’s colossal 1985 documentary about the Holocaust, an urbane, silver-haired man sits before the camera in suit and tie, gathering his courage to tell a story. This is Karski. He takes a breath.“Now I go back 35 years,” he begins, a strong Polish accent flavoring his words. But almost instantly his poise crumbles, and he begins to weep; the memories he is being asked to tap are too excruciating.“No. I don’t go back,” Karski says. As the camera watches, he flees the room.To Strathairn, who saw the nine-hour-plus “Shoah” in a single stretch when it was first released, that “microscopic moment” in the movie is “the portal into 35 years of silence.” In the theater’s dressing room, glasses perched atop his head, he traced a timeline of Karski’s life on the tabletop — events that, in Strathairn’s mind, are all contained somehow in that brief, tormented bit of film.At the start of the timeline, Karski’s childhood, when his Roman Catholic mother taught him to tell her when he saw “bad Catholic boys” throwing dead rats at Jews, so she could do something about it. Next his late 20s, in German-occupied Poland, when Jewish leaders sneaked him into the Warsaw Ghetto and a German concentration camp, so that he could tell the world what he’d seen happening there. Then the many postwar years when, having written a book about his experiences, he no longer spoke of them, even as he taught for decades in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Last, the chapter that began in the late 1970s, when Lanzmann convinced him that it was his responsibility to bear witness again for “Shoah” — which, after that initial loss of nerve, Karski did, and kept doing elsewhere.“Remember This,” which opens on Thursday in Brooklyn and is scheduled to run through Oct. 9, was created as a multicharacter piece at Georgetown for a centennial celebration in 2014 of Karski’s birth. Written by Derek Goldman, the artistic director of the university’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, and one of his former students, Clark Young, who graduated in 2009, it was initially titled “My Report to the World,” a phrase borrowed from the subtitle of Karski’s best-selling 1944 war memoir, “Story of a Secret State.”That book and E. Thomas Wood’s 1994 biography, “Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust,” were among the source materials for “Remember This,” alongside “Shoah” and other oral histories. The playwrights’ research also drew on the memories of people who knew Karski at Georgetown — and, in one case, Young said, at a local dentist’s office.In its ensemble form, the play traveled to Warsaw in 2014, and New York in 2015. Reshaped into a solo piece, it went to London in early 2020, and last year to Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington and Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Goldman, who directs the play, said that its current form allows Karski to stir “the moral conscience” as he talks to his students — that is, the audience — about his life and what he saw of the Holocaust.“Karski, I think, was that kind of teacher, who wanted to offer students access to the most elemental questions, because he had been grappling with them his whole life,” Goldman said. “‘How is this possible?’ ‘What does it mean to know?’ ‘What is a nation and what is a government if it can turn away from this?’”Goldman, 52, and Young, 35, both spoke of the failure that Karski felt when his eyewitness account of the Nazi slaughter, which he delivered in person to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, among numerous influential others, did not stop the Holocaust.“In many ways,” Young said, “I see him as someone who internalized a sense of failure that wasn’t his to hold. He was holding failures of nation states and individuals in power.”If that terrible sense of a vital mission not accomplished was part of Karski’s trauma, Strathairn observed that we can only speculate about the reasons for his decades of silence.“He never said why,” Strathairn said, and turned contemplative as he noted older generations’ sometimes overwhelming impulse to shield the younger from pain.“Do we impart horror upon our children? Or do we want to protect them?” he asked. “In many ways, we protect them from things that are part of life. We protect them from seeing us dying. We protect them from our grief, and we protect them from our fears. We don’t want to burden them with those things. And is that in service of their maturation, or is it not?“For me,” he continued, “that’s a teeter-totter. ‘I don’t want to talk about the war.’ ‘I don’t want my kid to think that the world is horrible and people did this to each other.’ ‘No, I’m going to stay on the sunny side of the street.’ Or do we prepare the next generation for the possibilities? Do we give them the awareness that this could happen again? In order to prevent that, you have to know what it was.”Onstage as Jan Karski, opening old wounds for his students to see, he is telling them what it was: barbarity. More

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      In ‘The Fabelmans,’ Steven Spielberg Himself Is the Star

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      But it’s Michelle Williams who burns brightest in this film based on Spielberg’s childhood, which just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans” is the movie every fall film festival was dying to have, but only Toronto got it. And at the Saturday-night premiere, the collective excitement was making people lose their minds.It wasn’t just the enthusiastic audience, many of whom had come straight from the well-received premiere of the “Knives Out” sequel “Glass Onion.” And it wasn’t just the giddiness of Cameron Bailey, who runs the Toronto International Film Festival, as he introduced the filmmaker for the first time. Even Spielberg himself got carried away in the madness.“I’m so glad I came to Toronto,” he said. Thank you, Steven. Same. #TIFF22 pic.twitter.com/wLAwQW58IW— Cameron Bailey (@cameron_tiff) September 11, 2022
      “I’m really glad we came to Toronto!” exclaimed the 75-year-old director, noting that this would be the first time a film of his had played at a film festival. That claim would appear to sweep away the New York Film Festival showings of “Bridge of Spies” and “Lincoln,” the Cannes premieres of “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and “The BFG,” and the South by Southwest bow of “Ready Player One,” but hey, sometimes you’ve got to clear the table before you can set it.And at least his lie felt emotionally true, since the stakes were so significant: By landing “The Fabelmans,” Toronto could fortify itself after two pandemic-diminished years, while Spielberg could claim the friendliest possible audience for his most personal film yet.Written by the director and his frequent collaborator Tony Kushner, “The Fabelmans” is an only slightly fictionalized retelling of Spielberg’s own coming-of-age. Sammy Fabelman (played as a teenager by Gabriel LaBelle) is a movie-mad kid who stages increasingly elaborate short films that star his sisters, classmates and semi-supportive parents. His dad, Burt (Paul Dano), is too swept up in his computer-programming job to understand Sammy’s artistic inclinations, but his mother, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), is a free spirit who never got to realize her dreams of working as a pianist and encourages Sammy to follow his bliss.Their mother-son bond is strong, and when Sammy films her dancing on a family trip and later shows her the edited footage, Mitzi beams. “You see me,” she says. But Sammy sometimes sees too much: As he gets older, he notices that Mitzi’s strong bond with her husband’s best friend (Seth Rogen) borders on an emotional affair. And as the family moves from New Jersey to Arizona and then finally to California, the ties that bind begin to fray.I found “The Fabelmans” to be only secondarily Spielberg’s origin story; primarily, it’s a look-at-what-she-can-do Michelle Williams vehicle, and the actress really goes for it, attacking this part like someone who knows she’s been handed her signature role. Based on Spielberg’s late mother, Leah, Mitzi is a dramatic personality, prone to flights of fancy and intense mood swings, and at any given moment, she’ll laugh, cry, sing or pack the kids into the car for an impromptu tornado chase. You love her, but she’s a lot — on this, the viewer and Sammy both agree — and Williams finds exactly the right moments to dial back the bigness and remind you that there is something private and vulnerable at the core of this very outgoing woman.Spielberg told the Toronto crowd that he’d had Williams in mind to play his mom ever since he saw her work in “Blue Valentine” (2010), which earned Williams the second of her four Oscar nominations; if she is campaigned as a supporting actress for “The Fabelmans” (as I suspect she will be, despite her ample screen time), this could very well propel the well-respected 42-year-old to her first win, just a year after Spielberg’s “West Side Story” actress Ariana DeBose topped that same race.Spielberg films always have plenty of Oscar upside, and “The Fabelmans” will be a strong contender in the picture and directing categories (and could even score a nod for Judd Hirsch, who puts in a scene-stealing cameo as Mitzi’s uncle), but the film is gentler, shaggier and more intimate than some of his other awards-season juggernauts, and there’s no need to oversell it at this early date. Even Spielberg, sensing all the hype in the room, sought to downplay speculation that “The Fabelmans” served as any sort of magnum-opus finale.“This is not because I’m going to retire and this is my swan song,” he told Toronto. “Don’t believe any of that!” More

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      ‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed’ Wins Best Film at Venice Film Festival

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      The director, Laura Poitras, praised Nan Goldin, the photographer and subject of her film, in her acceptance speech.“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” directed by Laura Poitras, was awarded the Golden Lion for best film at the 79th Venice International Film Festival on Saturday by a competition jury led by Julianne Moore. The film, about the photographer Nan Goldin, was the rare documentary to win the Golden Lion and won over strong competitors.“I’ve never met anyone like Nan,” Poitras said in her acceptance speech, praising Goldin as “courageous” in her protests against the Sackler family, whom Poitras described as “ruthless.” The film examines Goldin’s art, life and her activism in protesting the family and Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, for their roles in the opioid crisis. Poitras, whose 2014 film “Citizenfour” won the Oscar for best documentary, thanked the festival for recognizing that “documentary is cinema.”Poitras also called for the release of Jafar Panahi, the imprisoned Iranian director who directed “No Bears,” which premiered at the festival, and encouraged “all of us to do whatever we can.” She also spoke of the memory of the late influential documentary executive, Diane Weyermann.The 79th edition of the festival opened with Noah Baumbach’s “White Noise,” an adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel, starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig. Other prominent films included “The Whale,” “Blonde,” “Tár,” “Bones and All,” “The Banshees of Inisherin,” “Un Couple,” “Bardo,” “The Son” and “The Eternal Daughter.”Unlike many other festivals, the Venice Film Festival continued in person during the past two years, despite the pandemic. But this year, the Venice event especially thrived. Stars like Timothée Chalamet and Ana de Armas enthralled the robust crowds, and critical debate and red-carpet buzz were never in short supply. (Still, Covid remained a presence: Absent at the ceremony was one competition jury member, the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, who Moore explained had tested positive.)The Silver Lion Grand Jury prize went to Alice Diop’s “Saint Omer,” her feature about a novelist who becomes engrossed in the trial of a woman accused of leaving her baby on a beach to perish — a story based on a true tale. The Silver Lion award for best director went to Luca Guadagnino for “Bones and All,” the first Lion for the Italian film director.The Special Jury prize went to Panahi for “No Bears.” His award was accepted by two of the film’s actors, Mina Kavani and Reza Heydari, in his absence. The audience gave a standing ovation.The Volpi Cup for best actress was awarded to Cate Blanchett, who played the fictional famous composer at the center of “Tár,” directed by Todd Field. The best actor award went to Colin Farrell for his portrayal of an Irishman whose pal abruptly ends their friendship in Martin McDonagh’s “The Banshees of Inisherin.” Taylor Russell won the Marcello Mastroianni Award, which recognizes an outstanding emerging actor, for her performance as a young cannibal in “Bones and All.”The best screenplay honor was given to McDonagh, who wrote and directed “The Banshees of Inisherin” and who won the same honor in 2017 for “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” Diop’s “Saint Omer” also received the Lion of the Future Award for best debut feature. (Diop has already directed an acclaimed feature, the documentary “We,” which won a top award at the Berlin Film Festival.)In the Orizzonti section of the awards, which runs parallel to the primary competition, the top honor was given to Iranian filmmaker Houman Seyedi’s “World War III.” The film also featured a best actor award winner in Mohsen Tanabandeh, who played the protagonist.This edition’s Golden Lions for lifetime achievement went to Paul Schrader, whose film “Master Gardener” played out of competition, and to Catherine Deneuve. A Cartier Glory to the Filmmaker Award went to Walter Hill, whose film “Dead for a Dollar” played out of competition. More

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      Marsha Hunt, Actress Turned Activist, Is Dead at 104

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      She seemed well on her way to stardom until her career was derailed by the Hollywood blacklist. She then turned her attention to social causes.Marsha Hunt, who appeared in more than 50 movies between 1935 and 1949 and seemed well on her way to stardom until her career was damaged by the Hollywood blacklist, and who, for the rest of her career, was as much an activist as she was an actress, died on Wednesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 104.Her death was announced by Roger C. Memos, the director of the 2015 documentary “Marsha Hunt’s Sweet Adversity.”Early in her career, Ms. Hunt was one of the busiest and most versatile actresses in Hollywood, playing parts big and small in a variety of movies, including romances, period pieces and the kind of dark, stylish crime dramas that came to be known as film noir. She starred in “Pride and Prejudice” alongside Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier in 1940, and in “The Human Comedy” with Mickey Rooney in 1943. In later years, she was a familiar face on television, playing character roles on “Matlock,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and other shows.But in between, her career hit a roadblock: the Red Scare.Ms. Hunt’s problems began in October 1947, when she traveled to Washington along with cinematic luminaries like John Huston, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall as part of a group called the Committee for the First Amendment. Their mission was to observe and protest the actions of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was investigating what it said was Communist infiltration of the film industry.Many of those who made that trip subsequently denounced it, calling it ill-advised, but Ms. Hunt did not. And although she was never a member of the Communist Party — her only apparent misdeed, besides going to Washington, was signing petitions to support causes related to civil liberties — producers began eyeing her with suspicion.Ms. Hunt, second from left, with other members of the Committee for the First Amendment in Washington in October 1947. (Among the others pictured are John Huston, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, center, and Danny Kaye, sixth from right.) Her political activism led movie studios to stop offering her work.Associated PressHer status in Hollywood was already precarious when “Red Channels,” an influential pamphlet containing the names of people in the entertainment industry said to be Communists or Communist sympathizers, was published in 1950. Among the people named were Orson Welles, Pete Seeger, Leonard Bernstein and Marsha Hunt.By then, she had won praise for her portrayal of Viola in a live telecast of “Twelfth Night” in 1949. At the time, Jack Gould of The New York Times called her “an actress of striking and mellow beauty who also was at home with the verse and couplets of Shakespeare.” Her star turn in a 1950 revival of George Bernard Shaw’s “Devil’s Disciple,” the second of her six appearances on Broadway, had been the subject of a cover article in Life magazine. Yet, the movie offers all but stopped.In 1955, with little work to keep her at home, Ms. Hunt and her husband, the screenwriter Robert Presnell Jr., took a yearlong trip around the world. As a result of her travels, she told the website The Globalist in 2008, she “fell in love with the planet.”She became an active supporter of the United Nations, delivering lectures on behalf of the World Health Organization and other U.N. agencies. She wrote and produced “A Call From the Stars,” a 1960 television documentary about the plight of refugees.She also addressed issues closer to home. In her capacity as honorary mayor of the Sherman Oaks area of Los Angeles, a post she held from 1983 to 2001, she worked to increase awareness of homelessness in Southern California and organized a coalition of honorary mayors that raised money to build shelters.Ms. Hunt with Franchot Tone, left, and Gene Kelly in the 1943 movie “Pilot No. 5.”Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), via IMDbMarcia Virginia Hunt (she later changed the spelling of her first name) was born in Chicago on Oct. 17, 1917, to Earl Hunt, a lawyer, and Minabel (Morris) Hunt, a vocal coach. The family soon moved to New York City, where Ms. Hunt attended P.S. 9 and the Horace Mann School for Girls in Manhattan.A talent scout who saw her in a school play in 1935 offered her a screen test; nothing came of the offer, but that summer she visited her uncle in Hollywood and ended up being pursued by several studios. She signed with Paramount and made her screen debut that year in a quickly forgotten film called “The Virginia Judge.”She was soon being cast in small roles in a dizzying array of films. In “Easy Living” (1937), starring Jean Arthur, she had an unbilled but crucial part as a woman who has a coat fall on her head in the last scene. Bigger roles soon followed, especially after she joined Hollywood’s largest and most prestigious studio, MGM, in 1939.In 1943, she was the subject of a profile in The New York Herald Tribune that predicted a bright future. “She’s a quiet, well-bred, good-looking number with the concealed fire of a banked furnace,” the profile said. “She’s been in Hollywood for seven years, made 34 pictures. But, beginning now, you can start counting the days before she is one of the top movie names.”It never happened. In the aftermath of the blacklist, however, she began working frequently on television, appearing on “The Twilight Zone,” “Gunsmoke,” “Ben Casey” and other shows. She remained active on the small screen until the late 1980s.Her only notable movie in those years was “Johnny Got His Gun” (1971), an antiwar film written and directed by Dalton Trumbo, also a victim of the Hollywood blacklist, in which she played a wounded soldier’s mother.Ms. Hunt at her home in Los Angeles in 2007. She began working frequently on television in the wake of the Hollywood blacklist and continued acting until the late 1980s.Nick Ut/Associated PressMs. Hunt’s marriage to Jerry Hopper, a junior executive at Paramount, ended in divorce in 1945. The following year, she married Mr. Presnell. Their marriage lasted until his death in 1986. She is survived by several nieces and nephews.Ms. Hunt’s commitment to political and social causes did not diminish with age.In a 2021 interview with Fox News, she dismissed the notion that celebrities should avoid speaking out on political issues (“Nonsense — we’re all citizens of the world”) and explained what she considered to be the essential message of the documentary:“When injustice occurs, go on with your convictions. Giving in and being silent is what they want you to do.”Peter Keepnews contributed reporting. More

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      Gabrielle Union on Her Anti-Gay Mother in ‘The Inspection’

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      At the Toronto premiere, she spoke of playing a homophobic mother as “the challenge of a lifetime” because it represents everything she stands against in reality.After nearly 30 years of working in Hollywood, Gabrielle Union is used to facing slings and arrows. Still, when she opens up Twitter and sees people attacking her trans daughter, Zaya Wade, it hits differently.Or, as Union put it to me Thursday night at the after-party for “The Inspection,” which opened the Toronto International Film Festival: “You can say whatever about me — normally, I’m going to come with these fists, or I’m going to read you for filth. But when it’s your child, it’s a whole different ballgame.”As the loving parent of a trans teenager, Union and her husband, the former N.B.A. player Dwyane Wade, have become outspoken role models for parents of L.G.B.T.Q. children. “People are listening to me,” Union said, “and I have a responsibility to try to reach those parents if I can.” But in “The Inspection,” Union plays her total opposite: Inez, a flinty, chain-smoking prison guard whose homophobia is so deeply ingrained that she kicks her son out of the house at age 16 for being gay.“None of our children are disposable, but trying to shove that down and bring Inez forward was the challenge of a lifetime,” Union said after the film’s premiere, adding, “This is the most important work I’ve ever done.”The film, which is based on the writer-director Elegance Bratton’s own life story, follows Ellis (Jeremy Pope), who has spent years living on the streets of New York since his mother severed all ties with him. Desperate to turn his life around, Ellis enlists in the Marines and faces a hellish boot camp made even worse by the homophobic hazing from his fellow recruits. Still, Ellis perseveres, hoping that if he makes it through, that triumph can begin to repair the rift with the mother he still deeply loves.Union is best known for films like “Bring It On” and “Bad Boys II,” and though she rarely plays roles like the glammed-down, obstinate Inez, who is so disgusted by her son that she puts newspaper down before allowing him to sit on her couch, Bratton told me Union was always his first choice for the part.“In the Black community, she’s an icon,” Bratton said at the after-party. “I’ve always thought of her as the Black Charlize Theron, and I’m like, ‘Where are the parts to justify how I feel about her?’”Still, he confessed to an ulterior motive for casting her. Ever since Bratton was kicked out of his mother’s house as a teenager, “a huge part of what’s driven me is the idea of being unavoidable to people who don’t want to see me.” With the cultural cachet Union carries, Bratton hopes her presence will make “The Inspection” impossible to ignore.“Beyond her obvious talent, her beauty, and who she is as an activist and a superstar, she is a name that my mother would never be able to avoid,” he said. “Somebody will come to her and say, ‘Hey, Gabrielle Union played you in a movie. And she will see that movie, and I always hoped that when she saw it, it would change things between us.’”Bratton’s mother died while he was putting the movie together, and as he watched Union channel her on set, things often got so emotional that Union would come to the monitor and comfort him after a scene.“I say similar things to my own child that I said to Elegance,” Union recalled. “I’m not his mom, but what I can be is a loving adult. So hopefully there was some healing in there.”Did playing the character give Union insight into the people who attack her family on social media? Some, she said.“For Inez, and for a lot of the people I know, the commitment to the American dream — and the complete assimilation in order to be seen as worthy of upward mobility and opportunities — can literally drive you to abandon your own children,” Union said. “The lengths that people will go, to appear worthy to people who wouldn’t spit on you if you were on fire!”The actress continued, “Anything outside of what a very wealthy cis-het white man with power tells you is acceptable or appropriate or reasonable, you’ll cut off your arm if that’s what they tell you to do: ‘You’ve got to talk this way, you’ve got to walk this way, you’ve got to be this way! You’ve got to be straight and Christian! You can’t have sex in any other position other than the same old 6 o’clock with a very specific kind of person!’”And the desire to be seen as perfect in the eyes of the world isn’t worth it, said Union, who mentioned LeBron James, her husband’s longtime friend and former teammate. “Everyone likes to hold him up as an example: Rose out of poverty, single mom and became the best basketball player in the world.” But even with all that power, Union noted, the front gate of his Los Angeles home was still vandalized with a racial slur on the day before he was supposed to take the court in the 2017 N.B.A. finals.The lesson? “You can comport yourself and shape-shift constantly, and it doesn’t matter,” Union said. “So be yourself, and don’t throw away your kids. You think it’s going to get you further? It doesn’t. All you’ve done is lose a piece of you.” More

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      Mentors Named for Next Class in Rolex Arts Initiative

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      El Anatsui, Bernardine Evaristo and Dianne Reeves are among those pairing up for the program.The Ghanaian-born visual artist El Anatsui, the British writer Bernardine Evaristo, the Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke, the French architect Anne Lacaton and the American jazz singer Dianne Reeves are the new mentors in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, a program started by Rolex in 2002 to foster new generations of outstanding talent.The names of the new mentors and their protégés, who will collaborate for two years, were announced Friday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the Arts Initiative is celebrating the culmination of its current program cycle. This cycle included Lin-Manuel Miranda, the first mentor in a recently added open category to incorporate multidisciplinary artists.The protégés are the architect Arine Aprahamian, the writer Ayesha Harruna Attah, the visual artist Bronwyn Katz, the filmmaker Rafael Manuel and the singer and composer Song Yi Jeon. The protégés each receive a stipend of about $41,000 in addition to funds for travel and expenses.The new group of mentors and protégés hail “from nine different countries in Asia, Africa, North America, Europe and the Middle East,” Rebecca Irvin, the head of philanthropy at Rolex, said in an email. “And their artistic work reflects many of the most pressing issues of our day, including sustainability, diversity and social change.”Evaristo, who wrote in a statement that she had her eye on the program “ever since Toni Morrison was a mentor 20 years ago,” said that the “very close and personal attention” that the protégé receives is very different than attending workshops or writing courses. “It might also involve career guidance and personal development, as well as opening up conversations around creativity and society, and looking to other art forms for inspiration,” she said.Twenty years after it began, the Arts Initiative, which calls on influential advisers to select the mentors and protégés, now has a boldface list of alumni, including David Adjaye, Alfonso Cuarón, Brian Eno, Lara Foot, Stephen Frears, Nicholas Hlobo, David Hockney, Joan Jonas, Anish Kapoor, Spike Lee, Mira Nair, Crystal Pite and Tracy K. Smith. More

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      A Filmmaker Explores David Bowie’s Life and Gets Clarity on His Own

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      With the epic “Moonage Daydream,” Brett Morgen contended with a chameleonic star whose approach to living helped him refocus after a heart attack.When the documentary filmmaker Brett Morgen hit his eighth month of writer’s block on an epic project about David Bowie, he decided it was time to hit the road. With just a few hours’ notice, he left his home in Los Angeles one morning and grabbed the first flight to Albuquerque, where Bowie had filmed “The Man Who Fell to Earth” (1976). When Morgen arrived, he took a cab to the train station and hopped aboard an Amtrak, heading west.“Being in transit was an important theme in David’s life,” he said. “He talked a lot about riding the rails through the West. And a lot of songs that he wrote happened during some of his trips across America.”Morgen pulled out his notes; his phone, packed with all the albums; and his copy of “The Hero With a Thousand Faces” by Joseph Campbell. “I was thinking about ‘The Iliad,’” he said, “and I started to see David’s journey. Not all that dissimilar — but he was creating the storms for himself.” Suddenly, the script for his film, already three years in the making, began flowing.That trip was one of the many ways in which Bowie, the protean rock icon who died in 2016, influenced Morgen, an atmospheric documentarian known for showcasing big, world-changing personalities in “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck”; “The Kid Stays in the Picture,” about the Hollywood producer Robert Evans (co-directed with Nanette Burstein); and “Jane,” about Jane Goodall.Morgen’s opus about Bowie, “Moonage Daydream,” which opens in theaters and IMAX on Sept. 16, is billed not as a traditional documentary but as an immersive experience. It’s equal parts psychedelic and philosophical — a corkscrew into Bowie’s carefully constructed personae, assembled entirely from archival footage and audio, some of it rare and never broadcast before. The effect is “a hallucinatory jukebox doc with killer subtext,” as one reviewer wrote, appreciatively, after it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this spring.Though there have been other documentaries, and many books, this is the first project that had the full cooperation of Bowie’s estate, and total entrée to his voluminous archives. The songs have been stripped and rejuvenated for the soundtrack, and any narration there is comes from Bowie himself.“It was never designed to be a film about David Jones,” Morgen said, referring to the star’s given name, and added, “It’s a film about Bowie in quotations.”NeonBut that level of intimacy proved its own challenge as Morgen, the writer, director and producer, grappled with a mountain of material and wound up the sole editor after the production ran out of money. “I felt very confident that the through line of David’s artistic life was chaos and fragmentation,” Morgen said. He had heard those ideas come up again and again in Bowie’s interviews from 1971 on, and eventually decided to embrace them himself. Tony Visconti, Bowie’s longtime collaborator and producer, who served as a resource for the audio, came away impressed with the way the film kaleidoscoped the visuals, narration and music. “There is technical wizardry in all that,” he wrote in an email. “And when seen and heard, especially in an IMAX theater, you will get the most Bowie ever — sensory overload.”“David would be very impressed with this film,” he added.What Morgen didn’t realize was how much making the film would change him, especially after he had a debilitating heart attack, at 47. He flatlined and was in a coma for a week, he said in a phone interview. He emerged with a mind-set that shaped his approach to the story and refocused his own life, as a married father of three. Perversely, the driven Bowie helped Morgen, now 53, a fellow workaholic, find equilibrium.And he needed it, when he was editing, entirely solo, during the first peak of Covid (his health scare made him extra-cautious). “I was sitting alone in this building, making a film about an artist whose stock in trade is isolation, and how to channel it creatively,” he said. “So I felt that he was consistently describing the world that I was inhabiting.”Early on, he had visited Visconti in his New York studio. “We were in the room where he recorded David doing ‘Blackstar,’” the album Bowie released two days before his death, Morgen said. “It was quite intense.” Visconti played him “Cygnet Committee,” a prog-y folk-rock track off Bowie’s second album, stripping out vocals. The song, written when Bowie was around 22, ends with a repeated lyric: “I want to live.”“David was crying throughout the performance,” Morgen said.That sort of emotion — ravenous and vulnerable — set the tone for the film. “Moonage Daydream” was five years in the making. It took Morgen and his team over a year just to transfer hours of concert and performance footage, images of Bowie’s paintings and other content from the Bowie estate, along with additional footage acquired by Morgen’s archivist, and about two years to watch it all.But the movie is hardly completist. There are no interviews with anyone else, and no mention of, for example, Iggy Pop, whom Bowie holed up with in Berlin during one of his most creatively fertile periods, or Nile Rodgers, who helped him reinvent his career as a pop artist in the ’80s. The sexual voraciousness and drug addiction that usually feature heavily in Bowie’s story are referenced only with montages and jumpy interview clips. (“Do I need to spell it out? It seems kind of blatant to me,” Morgen said of one where Bowie appears sweating and grinning maniacally.) Though the movie dips into his childhood and family, it glosses over his personal life until his marriage to Iman, the model and entrepreneur.“It was never designed to be a film about David Jones,” Morgen said, using Bowie’s given name. Every time Bowie was onscreen, including interviews, was a performative moment, Morgen added, and that’s what he wanted to capture. “It’s a film about Bowie in quotations.”“Moonage Daydream” is more an immersive experience than a traditional documentary.NeonHe had first pitched Bowie directly on making a hybrid nonfiction film in 2007, when the artist was already wondering how to showcase his archives, but the timing and scope wasn’t right, Morgen said. He was exploring a similar nonfiction idea with the remaining Beatles when Bowie died, and a call with Bowie’s longtime business manager, Bill Zysblat, resurrected the film.Bowie’s estate gave him unfettered access but not much guidance, Morgen said. At one point, he wanted to discuss what direction to take. “Should we go more toward ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’” the 2018 Queen biopic, “and create a kind of populist singalong?” he asked. “Or should we do it more in the spirit of Bowie, which may be a little more adventurous?” And they said, “Well, that’s your problem.” (He employed Paul Massey, who shared an Oscar for sound mixing on “Bohemian Rhapsody” — which Morgen said he watched 14 or 15 times — for “Moonage Daydream.”)The estate, which is overseen by Zysblat, and includes Bowie’s family — his widow, Iman; their daughter, Alexandria Zahra Jones; and his son from his first marriage, the filmmaker Duncan Jones — declined to answer any questions, but they support the film. “Brett Morgen has created a stunning testament to David’s lasting influence on the world,” they said in a statement delivered through a representative. The estate has continued to earn money, selling Bowie’s songwriting catalog to Warner Music for an estimated $250 million this year, as his popularity (more than 1 billion streams on Spotify) and reputation as a cultural visionary — especially when it comes to technology and music — has only grown.For Morgen, one of the most illustrative points was the way Bowie behaved in many interviews, often with people who clearly did not get him; one, trying to suss out just how alien this gender-bending artist was, asked if he’d had a teddy bear as a child. And yet, “I never saw David talk down, be disrespectful, short, annoyed,” Morgen said.Maybe this was just politesse as a disarming tactic, but Morgen saw it as something deeper — an ability to seek connection and profundity in any situation. It was a message that he tried to convey in the film. Bowie was “trying to make each moment matter,” he said. “It’s a life-affirming sort of road map, on how to lead a satisfying and complete life.” More

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      ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’: What to Know Before Watching

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      After 13 years, James Cameron’s sequel, “Avatar: The Way of Water,” is finally opening in December. Here’s everything you need to know.What can be accomplished in 13 years? Given that much time, J.K. Rowling published all seven of the Harry Potter books — and helped turn the first six of them into movies. Taylor Swift cranked out eight studio albums — and rerecorded two of them. The Yankees won the World Series eight times.James Cameron made one film.“Avatar: The Way of Water,” a roughly three-hour sci-fi epic, is a sequel to his 2009 “Avatar,” which shattered box office records and garnered a devoted fan base. (The three Academy Awards — for art direction, cinematography and visual effects — didn’t hurt either.) It’s set for a holiday-season release on Dec. 16 in theaters.If you remember very little about Pandora, here’s a refresher on the “Avatar” plot, the phenomenon it became and the stakes a sequel faces.OK, I just need to make sure before I get my hopes up yet again: This is really, finally, actually happening?Yes.Why did it take so long?The short answer is that the dazzling — and costly — array of visual effects means these films spend forever and a day in preproduction. Also, a majority of the sequel was filmed underwater, and new motion-capture technology had to be developed to accomplish the feat.Thirteen years is a long time, but not long enough for me to have seen the original “Avatar.” Can I watch “The Way of Water” anyway?Well, yes, but it’d be like diving into the “Star Wars” franchise with “The Empire Strikes Back.” How did Han Solo get in that carbonite? And what’s the deal with him and Princess Leia?OK, got it, not optional. So where can I watch “Avatar”?You’ll no longer be able to find it on Disney+ after it was quietly removed from the streaming service in August. You can, however, see “Avatar” in theaters beginning Sept. 23, when Disney will rerelease it with remastered audio and picture.Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldaña in a scene from the original.20th Century FoxI don’t have time to rewatch a nearly three-hour film! Hit me with the highlights.It’s the middle of the 22nd century and humans have depleted Earth’s natural resources, so they are now colonizing a moon known as Pandora, which is home to both the valuable mineral unobtanium and a tribe of 10-foot-tall indigenous blue creatures known as Na’vi, who look like a mash-up of the Blue Man Group, centaurs, professional basketball players and armed supermodels. A group of specially trained humans inhabit genetically engineered Na’vi bodies, known as avatars, to interact with the tribe while their human bodies remain in a remote location.The protagonist is Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic ex-Marine who replaces his identical twin brother in the Avatar Program after his death. Power struggles ensue within the program about what is worth sacrificing to obtain the unobtanium, as well as the value of Na’vi life; within the forest, as Jake tries to convince the Na’vi to accept him as one of their own; and within Jake himself. He grapples with the ethics of what he is doing, which is complicated by the fact that he has fallen for one of the Na’vi women, Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña).After Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), the head of the security force for the group mining the unobtanium, destroys the Na’vi’s gathering place, Hometree, and kills many of them, Jake confronts him in his Na’vi form. Quaritch almost kills Jake before Neytiri fatally shoots the colonel with two arrows to the chest. Jake, in love with Neytiri and having gained the trust of the Na’vi, chooses to transfer to his avatar form permanently. The film’s closing shot is of his eyes, waking up on Pandora.The visual effects in the film were a big deal, right?Oh, yes. Reviewers focused as much — if not more — on the images as on the plot, both explaining and lauding the use of performance capture, which was then a newfangled innovation that had been most notably used for Gollum in Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” films.Wasn’t “Avatar” released in 3-D?Yes, it was shot with a 3-D camera system that gave Cameron an augmented-reality view in real time by integrating the live actors with computer-generated environments in the viewfinder. “Avatar” was one of the films that restarted a fad of 3-D cinematic releases, though you may not have actually seen it in 3-D: Many theaters didn’t yet have 3-D projection systems.What about the film itself? Was it any good?It brought in more than $2.8 billion at the worldwide box office, becoming the highest-grossing movie of all time, not adjusted for inflation. Reviewing the film for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis named it a Critic’s Pick, calling it “glorious and goofy and blissfully deranged.”Both critics and audiences lauded the visuals and immersive world-building, but the story itself — which was familiar to anyone who had seen “Dances With Wolves” or “The Last Samurai” — won far less acclaim, with a large portion of reviewers dismissing it as generic or unoriginal. In her review, Dargis also criticized Cameron’s writing, particularly the dialogue, which she noted veered into “comically broad” territory at times (case in point: “Yeah, who’s bad?” Jake taunts a rhinolike creature).Jake Sully (Worthington) is back for the sequel, in which he’s now a father. 20th Century StudiosIs Cameron writing the sequel, too?Yes, though while he had sole script credit on “Avatar,” he co-wrote “The Way of Water” with Josh Friedman, who wrote the 2005 “War of the Worlds” adaptation that was directed by Steven Spielberg, and is co-writing the forthcoming “Star Trek 4” film.What do we know about “The Way of Water” so far?Cameron, who won an Academy Award for directing “Titanic,” is going back to the sea with the sequel, which is — as you may have guessed from the title — set primarily underwater. It takes place more than a decade after the events of the first film and focuses on Jake Sully and Neytiri and their preteen children. It also introduces a new tribe of reef-dwelling Na’vi known as the Metkayina.Is Zoe Saldaña back?Saldaña, who became a fan favorite for her performance as Neytiri and went on to play the green-skinned Gamora in Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” films, is back for “The Way of Water,” along with Worthington, Lang, Sigourney Weaver, Joel David Moore and CCH Pounder. Yes, some of their characters are apparently dead, and no, we haven’t figured out how that works yet.They’ll be joined by prominent newcomers, including Kate Winslet (the Na’vi leader Ronal), Cliff Curtis (Tonowari, a leader of the Metkayina clan), Edie Falco (a military officer) and Jemaine Clement (a marine biologist).Will the sequel be shown in 3-D?Yes, but good news for glasses-wearers: You won’t need two sets to take in the film; a newer laser system eliminates the need for special glasses. (Though many theaters, as was the case the first time around, do not yet have the necessary equipment.)Am I going to have to wait 13 more years for “Avatar 3”?Cameron has signed on to make three more sequels, and they’re currently set for release in 2024, 2026 and 2028.But maybe pencil in 2035, 2048 and 2061, just in case. More