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A documentary about the singer and civil rights activist Marian Anderson, a museum exhibition dedicated to Norman Rockwell’s “The Four Freedoms,” a digital archive dedicated to Walt Whitman and a dictionary of dialects spoken by the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians are among the 224 projects across the country to receive new grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities.The grants, which total $22.2 million, support both individual scholarly projects and large institutional collaborations, all of which, the agency’s chairman, Jon Parrish Peede, said in a statement, “exemplify the spirit of the humanities and their power to educate, enrich and enlighten,” particularly in difficult times.“When every individual, community and organization in America is feeling the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, it is a joy to be able to announce new projects that will produce vibrant humanities programs and resources for the reopening of our cultural centers and educational institutions,” he said.The awards, which are part of the agency’s regular cycle of grants, come several weeks after the N.E.H. received $75 million in supplemental funding as part of the $2.2 trillion stimulus package. Mr. Peede has guaranteed that 100 percent of that funding will be distributed directly to grantees, rather than covering the agency’s operational expenses, the agency said.The projects receiving grants include a series of 30-minute films about rural historic churches in the South, supported as part of a new effort to back short documentary films. There are also awards for a film about the legacy of L. Frank Baum, the author of “The Wizard of Oz,” and a documentary on the life of Rywka Lipszyc, a 14-year-old girl whose diary was discovered in the rubble of Auschwitz in 1945.Another new class of grants, dedicated to chronicling the experience of war, supports a Veteran to Scholar Bootcamp at East Carolina University and a discussion program at Messiah College in Pennsylvania dedicated to the experiences of women in the United States military.The grants also include several connected with planning for the 250th celebration of America’s founding, in 2026, as well as several grants supporting exploration of little-known chapters of American history, like one dedicated to an exhibition at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia chronicling the short-lived equal voting rights of women in New Jersey in the decades after independence. More

Over the last couple of weeks, the comedian Eugene Mirman, star of the new documentary “It Started as a Joke,” has added a much-needed dose of absurdist wit to Twitter feeds with his “Daily Quarantine Routine.” No. 12 begins: “7am: Wake up, churn butter wrong and throw it out. 8am: Make a list of other things to fear once this is over. 12pm: Lunch of boob-shaped pasta thrown at you by drunk bachelorettes from a party trolley 2 years ago.”In fact, his real routine starts with making breakfast for his 3-year-old son, Ollie. “I see it as surviving and doing it a day at a time,” Mirman, 45, said by Skype from Cape Cod.Even before Covid-19 loomed large over the public imagination, Mirman had been living with the specter of death and disease. In 2011 his wife, Katie Westfall Tharp, a set decorator, learned she had breast cancer, and after going through many treatments, including chemotherapy, she died on Jan. 29. Not long after this tragic loss, Mirman found himself shifting from talking to his son about death to explaining the dangers of doorknobs. “We just have to get through it,” he said, sounding stoic and practical. “I think it’s important to find any moment of joy. So when people ask, ‘Is this a time to joke around?’ it definitely is.”[embedded content]That spirit is at the core of “It Started as a Joke,” available on demand, which chronicles Mirman’s relationship with his wife and the influential comedy festival he hosted for a decade. Funny and elegiac, the movie, directed by Julie Smith Clem and Ken Druckerman, is also the first sustained portrait of a key cultural moment, the birth of modern Brooklyn comedy.More great comics have come from Brooklyn than any other place, and once you start listing the legendary names (Chris Rock, Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler, Joan Rivers, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Larry David and on and on) it’s not even close. The borough has never been home to many clubs, with a few exceptions, like the defunct Sheepshead Bay landmark Pips. The first comedy club in New York and arguably the country, it kick-started the careers of Rodney Dangerfield and Andrew Dice Clay. Still, Brooklyn has historically been a breeding ground more than a scene — until relatively recently.About 15 years ago, the center of gravity of what was once called alt comedy moved from downtown Manhattan to the borough. No one was more important to that shift than Eugene Mirman.In 2006, Mirman, who had cut his teeth as a host and performer at a regular show at the East Village space Rififi, started co-hosting (with Michael Showalter) the Sunday comedy showcase Pretty Good Friends in the basement of Union Hall, then a new space in Park Slope that was designed primarily for music. The evening, originally named Tearing the Veil of Maya, was the hall’s first regular comedy show. Before they were stars, John Oliver, John Mulaney, Chelsea Peretti, Aziz Ansari and Zach Galifianakis did sets.What stands out about those early lineups is not just how many future stars performed there early in their careers, but also the remarkable consistency of talent on display. The diversity of styles was evident as well, from musical performers (Reggie Watts, Tim Minchin) to storytellers (Mike Birbiglia, Daniel Kitson) to stand-ups (Sarah Silverman, Jim Gaffigan).The success of Pretty Good Friends, the only regular comedy show at Union Hall that first year, led to evenings at other Brooklyn spaces. Big Terrific, a popular weekly showcase hosted by Jenny Slate, Gabe Liedman and Max Silvestri, became the hot spot for comedy in Williamsburg.“We wanted Big Terrific to be the same kind of welcoming, experimental home” as the kind Mirman made, Silvestri wrote in an email, pointing out that Mirman’s use of projector and video was formative.Mirman built on Pretty Good Friends to launch the Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival, a spoof of industry events that is the subject of “It Started as a Joke.” The festival began in another new space, a warehouse called the Bell House in a then-quiet area of Gowanus, and featured shows with titles like “Comics We Think Ruth Bader Ginsburg Would Enjoy” and “An Evening of Entertainment from People in Black Glasses.” Union Hall and Bell House (which not incidentally were near where Mirman lived) have become bustling centers of comedy today with nightly shows and comedians regularly developing and shooting specials.“One of the things that Eugene did was open the door to all types of show formats,” said Jim Carden, who runs both spaces. “We owe so much to Eugene for what he started.”Mirman didn’t just help establish two landmark comedy homes. He also became a focal point of a community of comics, helping give many their start. (In the documentary, Kumail Nanjiani says Mirman was the first person to give him a big credit.) In 2011, Interview magazine called Mirman the “de facto leader of the Brooklyn scene,” and in the new documentary, Bobcat Goldthwait describes him this way: “He’s the drain in the sink that catches all the weirdos.”Did this diverse community of weirdos share an aesthetic?It’s easier to define what that aesthetic wasn’t: club comedy and traditional stand-up. But even that is a simplification, since those approaches were welcome as well. Mirman has always defined comedy as broadly as possible, and while there are still comics with rigid ideas about what constitutes stand-up, Mirman’s more catholic tastes have won the day. What was once alt is now mainstream. Asked if he thought there was a common style to the scene back in the day, Mirman pointed to “a sort of sincerity to themselves, an authenticity, a silliness.”Mirman’s own stand-up is infused with a warm and cheerful sense of the ridiculous, including satirical bits that sting instead of lash and stories using show-and-tell-style props. He has a prickly side, too, and some of his best-known stunts build on minor grievances, as when he took out a full-page newspaper ad venting ludicrous rage about a parking ticket in a New Hampshire town. The ad closed by turning the state’s motto (“Live Free or Die”) back at the town, saying drivers don’t even get “freedom to back into a spot.”His greatest legacy might be helping build something so successful, its end was inevitable. He stopped doing the weekly show and the festival was over after a decade, when most of his peers moved to Los Angeles for TV and film work. Mirman recalled specifically when he realized the end was near, when Kristen Schaal (who along with Kurt Braunohler hosted Hot Tub, another regular comedy show that moved to Brooklyn) told him she was moving to the West Coast. “I came home and told Katie: The world I am part of is winding down.”The Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival has been replaced by the Janelle James Comedy Festival, and a new generation of Brooklyn comics has filled the spaces he pioneered. And while his reputation has faded among young comics, you can see echoes of his influence in the bustling, vital Brooklyn scene today. Video is common as is his off-kilter, multi-hyphenate aesthetic. Compare his advertisements for shapes like squares and triangles on his debut album with the surreal meditations on shapes in the recent HBO special of Julio Torres. But also, the mood of Mirman’s shows — amiable, casual, a bit chummy, as the title Pretty Good Friends suggests — is common.Mirman still does stand-up, has released a handful of specials and is a star of the sitcom “Bob’s Burgers,” but he did not become as famous as many of the comics he booked. Instead of moving to the West Coast, he went to Massachusetts, to be closer to his family. “If Katie hadn’t been sick, would we have stayed in New York or gone to L.A.?” he asked himself at one point in our interview. “Maybe. Over all, what I wanted to do is make things with friends, which I do. And I incredibly appreciate it.”Late in the documentary, his wife is at home reflecting on the fact that despite the fact that she spends so much of her time with her son, he will be too young to remember it. Trying to comfort her, Mirman responds that Ollie will be able to see her in this movie. Her sarcastic response: “I really want him to know about comedy.” In a movie packed full of comics telling jokes, this might be the best line, with a perfect dry delivery.By early January, on the advice of doctors, they decided to stop treatment. In her final month, Tharp moved to a hospice, where many friends visited to say goodbye. Mirman told me about these experiences with gratitude, saying that when he thinks of people dying from the coronavirus, isolated and unable to see their families, his heart breaks.“Nothing is a cure for death,” he said. “But connection is a salve.” More

Honor Blackman, an actress who achieved fame as a beautiful pilot with judo skills and a highly suggestive name in the 1964 James Bond movie “Goldfinger,” then went on to a long screen career in her native England and abroad, has died at her home in Lewes, in southeastern England. She was 94.Her family announced her death in a statement released to The Guardian in London. She was a breast cancer survivor, having undergone a lumpectomy in 2003.Ms. Blackman may have been unknown to American audiences when she played Pussy Galore opposite Sean Connery as the dashing secret agent James Bond, but she had already become a star in Britain on television.She joined the spy series “The Avengers” for its second season in 1962, replacing Ian Hendry as the co-star of Patrick Macnee, who played John Steed, an almost painfully cultured British intelligence agent. Her character, Mrs. Cathy Gale, was an anthropologist who enjoyed martial arts and dressing head to toe in leather while saving the world from increasingly bizarre plots and conspiracies.It was only after Ms. Blackman left the series two years later that the show was exported to the United States; American viewers were introduced instead to her successor, Diana Rigg, as Mr. Macnee’s newest partner, Emma Peel.Ms. Blackman gave up “The Avengers” to take the role in “Goldfinger,” the third movie in the Bond series. In her late 30s when she made the film, she turned out to be one of the oldest “Bond girls” in the series, although she always objected to that term.“I consider Bond girls to be those ladies who took one look at Bond and fell on their backs,” Ms. Blackman told the website Cambridge News in 2012. Early on in “Goldfinger,” Ms. Galore declares to Bond, “I am immune to your charms” and judo-flips him into a haystack. (It turns out not to be a permanent immunity, however.)Honor Blackman was born on Aug. 22, 1925, in London, the third of four children of Frederick Blackman, a civil-service statistician, and the former Edith Eliza Stokes. Her father was a crucial influence on her decision to pursue an acting career, she recalled. When she was a teenager, he gave her a choice of a bicycle or elocution lessons (he felt his own East London accent had held him back in life); she chose the lessons.She later attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London and began performing onstage.Her first credited screen role was in “Daughter of Darkness” (1948), a British crime film with horror elements; that came after she died in a horseback riding accident in an uncredited part in “Fame Is the Spur,” a 1947 movie starring Michael Redgrave.Before “Goldfinger,” she made dozens of appearances on British television and more than 20 feature films, among them “A Night to Remember” (1958), Roy Ward Baker’s drama about the sinking of the Titanic; “The Square Peg” (1959), a comedy with Norman Wisdom set during World War II; and “Jason and the Argonauts” (1963), in which she played the goddess Hera.Ms. Blackman continued her screen acting career well into her 80s, including taking a small part as a glamorous party guest in “Bridget Jones’s Diary” (2001) and a recurring role on the classic British soap opera “Coronation Street” in 2004.She worked in the theater for decades as well. In the 1980s she did a British tour of “A Little Night Music” (she deemed Madame Armfeldt in that show her favorite role — “That part just fit me like a glove,” she told the British Huffington Post) and played Captain von Trapp’s child-averse love interest, the Baroness, in a West End revival of “The Sound of Music.”In later years, she played Henry Higgins’s mother in a national tour of “My Fair Lady” (2005) and Fraulein Schneider in the West End revival of “Cabaret” (2007).Ms. Blackman returned to the television spotlight in 1990 on “The Upper Hand,” a British version of “Who’s the Boss?” Her character (played by Katherine Helmond in the American version) was a glamorous, sexually eager grandmother, and she continued in the role for six seasons.Ms. Blackman had a singing career as well. She recorded “Kinky Boots” with her former co-star Mr. Macnee in 1964, although it became a hit only when it was rereleased in 1990. (Her “Avengers” character had a taste for thigh-high, spike-heeled black boots, but the later “Kinky Boots” film and stage musical were unrelated.) She released a new single, “The Star Who Fell From Grace,” in 2009, when she was in her 80s.Her final movie was the 2012 horror comedy “Cockneys vs. Zombies,” in which bank robbers unwittingly unleash an army of the living dead in East London. Her last screen role was in a 2015 episode of the British sitcom “You, Me & Them.”Ms. Blackman wed Bill Sankey, a businessman, in 1946; they divorced in 1954. She married Maurice Kaufmann, a British actor, in 1961; the couple had two children and divorced in 1975.She is survived by a daughter, Lottie Kaufmann; a son, Barnaby Kaufmann; and four grandchildren.Throughout her career, Ms. Blackman admitted to being painfully self-critical and sometimes blamed her father, because of his refusal to praise her for a job well done. But as the decades passed, she came to value his influence.“What he taught me has stood me in good stead,” she told the Australian newspaper The Courier-Mail in 2007. “Self-discipline, the ability to work and order my life come from him, and I’m grateful for that. What’s done is done, and you can’t bemoan the past.” More

In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series each Friday. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.A series of questions posed to a young woman at an abortion clinic takes an emotional toll in the drama “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” written and directed by Eliza Hittman and now available on demand.The main character, Autumn, played by Sidney Flanigan, has traveled from her home in Pennsylvania to New York City to seek an abortion. At a Planned Parenthood clinic, a social worker (Kelly Chapman, an actual counselor Hittman met doing research for the film) goes over a list of questions, mainly about her relationships, with four possible responses: never, rarely, sometimes or always. That questioning becomes increasingly more taxing for Autumn as the scene progresses.In this video, Hittman talks about the way the scene was rehearsed, how she isolated her lead actress on the set before shooting, and why she kept the image simple (primarily a one-take shot trained on Autumn’s face).Read the “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, streaming recommendations and more. More