Movies

During the germinal days of television, just by being herself, the actress Joyce Gordon made a gender stereotype anachronistic.“I’m not a glamour girl — most women aren’t,” she volunteered in a 1961 interview. “I’m an attractive, up-to-date young woman — glasses and all.”Confident and, clinically, farsighted, Ms. Gordon, who died at 90 on Feb. 28, became famous as “The Girl With the Glasses,” for un-self-consciously wearing her signature eyeglasses on camera as she delivered live, on-air advertising pitches for products like Crisco and Duncan Hines cake mixes.For all the headlines that her eyewear inspired, though, Ms. Gordon was also known for her voice. She reached radio listeners and television viewers through commercials and promotional announcements. Moviegoers heard her in dubbed foreign films — as a stand-in, for example, for Claudia Cardinale in Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West,” released in the United States in 1969.And, her agent said, she was the voice in the ubiquitous recording that advised telephone callers in the 1980s and ’90s that “the number you have reached is no longer in service.”Her daughter, Melissa Grant, confirmed Ms. Gordon’s death, in Manhattan.Ms. Gordon was credited with blazing other trails professionally. According to the Screen Actors Guild, she broke ground in 1966 as the first woman to head a local unit of the union when she was elected president of the New York branch in 1966. She was the first woman to serve as an announcer on a network TV broadcast of a national political convention, in 1980 on ABC, and the first to do on-air promotions for a network, plugging news and sports programs on NBC for four decades.“Her stature as a pitchwoman and voice-over talent was indispensable in convincing the advertising industry to take seriously the concerns of commercial performers in the early days of that contract,” said Gabrielle Carteris, the president of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.Ms. Gordon pitched many household goods and personal products on television, but, as one interviewer wrote, she “has probably done more for the eyesight of the American woman than all the professionals and their lectures.”Her glasses were not a prop.She had been squinting into the camera while rehearsing a commercial when an advertising agency representative, observing her in the studio, suggested that she wear her glasses on air. He assured her that he would persuade the sponsor to agree to what would be a radical departure from convention.“Gradually, I realized what he was driving at,” she recalled. “The glasses give me identity and authority.”Moreover, she said, “people tend to feel that I’m natural.”She went on to be profiled in Broadcasting magazine in 1960 under the headline “The TV Girl Who Wears Glasses.” TV Guide put her on the cover as the first woman to wear glasses while appearing under her own name as a “TV hostess.” (“I enjoy being myself instead of playing a part,” she was quoted as saying.)Ms. Gordon said she had felt awkward on dinner dates because she had had trouble reading menus, but added: “Now I wear my glasses, and it doesn’t seem to make any difference to the fellows.”Joyce Gordon was born on March 25, 1929, in Des Moines, Iowa, to Jule and Diana (Cohn) Gordon. Her father, a cosmetics and hair-care industry executive, founded the National Barber and Beauty Manufacturers Association.Reared in Chicago, Ms. Gordon attended the University of Illinois and the University of Wisconsin. She moved to New York City when she was 19, to pursue a career in entertainment. She landed parts on radio and live television programs, including “Studio One” and “Robert Montgomery Presents.” She began doing mostly commercials in the mid-1950s.In addition to her decades of union involvement, she was also active in civic affairs in Westchester County, N.Y., where she lived, as a member of the White Plains City Council.She was married to Bernard Grant, an actor who was a fixture on soap operas as Dr. Paul Fletcher in “The Guiding Light” and as Steve Burke in “One Life to Live.” He died in 2004. Besides her daughter, she is survived by her son, Mark Grant; her sister, Jill Gordon; and a grandson.A boom in dubbing foreign-language films for English-speaking audiences revitalized Ms. Gordon’s career. She became the voice of Annie Girardot, Jeanne Moreau and other stars in movies by Ingmar Bergman, Jean Renoir and Luchino Visconti, filling a professional niche that requires an actress to give up her own persona.“You have to try to crawl into the other actor’s body, to understand how a shrug, a raised eyebrow, a way of breathing can affect the performance,” Ms. Gordon told The New York Times in 1982.Being cast as a disembodied voice onscreen seemed like a variation on the adage about being heard but not seen. After “Once Upon a Time in the West” was released, a reviewer credited Ms. Cardinale, who was born in Tunisia and spoke Italian with a pronounced French accent, for her command of English. Ms. Gordon was unfazed.“It’s an anonymous kind of gratification,” she said. More

The New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, held every March at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, is the world’s premier gathering of buyers, sellers and lovers of rare books. It’s a kind of Woodstock for the ultra-bookish, where museum-like displays of stunningly bound 16th-century volumes and illuminated manuscripts are surrounded by booths specializing in rare maps, historical documents, vintage crime novels, counterculture ephemera and just about anything else, as long as it’s (mostly) on paper.One veteran dealer interviewed in the early scenes of “The Booksellers,” a documentary opening Friday, just time for this year’s fair, calls it “a roller-coaster ride between tedium and great bits of commerce and discoveries.”For the less jaded first-time visitor, it can also be an overwhelming explosion of stimulation.“Going in, you might imagine it’s a bunch of old brown spines, but it’s completely the opposite,” D.W. Young, the film’s director, said last week while sitting in a the suitably book-crammed offices of Sanctuary Books, a rare-book outfit a few blocks from the armory. “It’s just an amazingly visually rich experience.”[embedded content]Another thing you might not expect: The world of rare books is a surprisingly tactile place.“I was amazed by how much you can touch,” Judith Mizrachy, one of the film’s producers, said, recalling the first time she visited the shop. “But you realize that these things last. They’re meant to be held, and they’ve made it this far.”Survival — of books, and of the rare-book business itself — is a major theme of the documentary, which plunges viewers into this world via the passionate, eclectic, undersung people who make it all hum: the booksellers.It was one of them, Daniel Wechsler, the proprietor of Sanctuary Books, who first brought up the idea of a documentary seven years ago with Young and Mizrachy (with whom he’d collaborated on an earlier documentary, about a New York City street photographer).By the time they began working on it a few years later, the project had taken on greater urgency, as more figures from their imagined dream cast of characters — like Martin Stone, the British rock guitarist turned book scout — died. (Stone, the story goes, was once considered to replace Brian Jones in the Rolling Stones but chose a life of digging through crates of books instead.)“This was the generation that really made their mark before the internet,” Wechsler said. “If we didn’t record their contributions, they might not be around much longer.”The film’s approach is immersive, treating its subjects — mainly booksellers, but also collectors, auctioneers, curators and others up and down the trade’s food chain — less as talking heads than as “jazz soloists,” as Young put it, offering variations on recurring themes. If there’s an underlying bass note, it’s the way the profession is driven by equal parts commerce, scholarship and sheer love.“Booksellers are providing something beyond the mercantile,” Young said. “They perform a core function of preservation.”Wechsler, 52, got into the business about 30 years ago, after a post-college stint at Second Story Books outside Washington. A few years ago, he had a brush with fame, or at least the antiquarian bookseller’s version of it, when he and a colleague announced the discovery of an elaborately annotated 1580 dictionary they hypothesized might have belonged to Shakespeare (a claim that has been met with respectful skepticism).Sanctuary, housed in an unassuming midcentury office overlooking a tony stretch of Madison Avenue (and open by appointment only), is suitably atmospheric, particularly as the late afternoon light filters in.“Sometimes bookstores will have that one embarrassing section,” Wechsler said, giving the crammed shelves a self-conscious scan as a photographer began shooting. “But I think this is pretty good right now.”Still, it’s nothing compared with some of the jaw-dropping spaces the documentary peeks into, like the collector Jay Walker’s M.C. Escher-inspired Library of the History of Human Imagination (complete with floating platforms and glass-paneled bridges); or the vast warehouse of the dealer James Cummins, crammed with 300,000-plus books — New Jersey’s answer to Jorge Luis Borges’s infinite Library of Babel.And then there are the film’s more alarming settings. In one sequence, the camera follows a dealer on a scouting trip to a stunningly decrepit apartment off Central Park West belonging to a recently deceased academic.“It was toxic — the mold, the broken windows,” Young recalled. “It was just full of books. And they all had to go somewhere.”The film explores the ways the internet has radically transformed (some of the gloomier voices might say “destroyed”) the rare-book business, taking away “the dark and murky and fun aspects” of the hunt, as one dealer puts it, while disastrously flooding the market for some kinds of books, like modern first editions.But the filmmakers also show a hopeful infusion of new blood and an opening up to new collecting areas (hip-hop ephemera, zines, comics), new ways of selling and a (somewhat) more diverse demographic.“The film captures what I love about bookselling, which is that there are lots of different ways to do it,” Heather O’Donnell, the founder of the Brooklyn-based Honey & Wax Booksellers, said in an interview this week. “It’s not some secret elite club.”Last week, O’Donnell, who appears in the documentary, started posting images to a new Instagram account, @europaredux, in an effort to crowdsource information about one of her offerings at this year’s fair: a collection of 7,000 illustrations from prewar Europe, made by an unidentified Swiss artist who captioned them in an imaginary language.“Social media has the potential to open things up to so many different kinds of people and different kinds of material,” she said. “You can start as a bookseller with just 10 books on Etsy.”The New York Antiquarian Book FairThrough Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue, New York; 212-777-5218, nyantiquarianbookfair.com. More

Griselda Pollock, a Canadian and British art historian known for pioneering feminist study in the discipline, won the Holberg Prize, one of the largest international awards given to scholars in the humanities, social sciences, law or theology.The prize committee, in a citation, called Ms. Pollock “the foremost feminist art historian working today.” “Since the 1970s, Pollock has been teaching and publishing in a field in which she is not only a renowned authority, but which she helped create,” the committee wrote. The panel also noted her contributions to the field of film studies and cultural history broadly.The Holberg Prize, first awarded in 2004, comes with an award of 6 million Norwegian kroner, or about $650,000, and is given every year to a researcher who has made outstanding contributions in fields in the humanities, social sciences, law or theology. The prize is funded by the Norwegian government. Past winners include Paul Gilroy, Cass Sunstein and Onora O’Neill.Ms. Pollock is a professor at the University of Leeds. She has published 22 monographs, with four more forthcoming. Her 1981 book, “Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology,” co-authored with Rozsika Parker, was a radical critique of the discipline of art history and its canon. It has become a classic text in feminist art history, as has her 1988 book, “Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art.”“I have spent 40 years creating new concepts with which to challenge art history’s white patriarchal structure to produce ways of thinking about art,” Ms. Pollock said in a statement, “its images, its practices, its effects that are not about admiration of selective greatness.”Gender is only one of many lenses through which she has sought to reframe art historical study. In 2001 she founded the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History, a transdisciplinary project connecting the study of art history with gender, class, sexuality, post-colonial and queer theory. “I analyze and resist the injuries of class, race, gender, sexuality as they are inflicted through images and cultural forms such as media, cinema, art, literature and academic thought,” she said.Hazel Genn, the Holberg Committee chairwoman, said Ms. Pollock has been “a beacon for generations of art and cultural historians.” More

The town in the shocker “Bacurau” is fictional, a bit magical, at once ordinary and otherworldly. It’s filled with faces that have life etched in them, which helps deepen the realism. And while the story is set in the near future, it looks like the present: the charming landscapes, laughing children, crowing roosters, the grinning balladeer with a guitar. Then, the guns come out, history rushes in and a ghost pops by. (It smiles.)In the wild world of “Bacurau,” queasy humor meets razor-sharp politics and rivers of blood. An exhilarating fusion of high and low, the movie takes a shopworn premise — townsfolk facing a violent threat — and bats it around until it all goes ka-boom. Part of what’s exciting is how the filmmakers marshal genre in the service of their ideas, using film form to deflect, tease and surprise. The movie looks and plays like a western but also flirts with dystopian science fiction and pure pulp: bang, bang, splat. By the time the cult actor Udo Kier rolls up it’s clear that anything gleefully goes.It’s also obvious that the writer-directors Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles are having a good time, and they want you to have one too. Dornelles has worked as a production designer on Mendonça Filho’s movies, including his sui generis “Neighboring Sounds” and “Aquarius.” Their partnership proves seamless on “Bacurau,” which flows despite a switch-backing story that starts with a truck bouncing along a remote highway, a woman riding shotgun. The countryside is green in the way of certain deserts, but empty coffins litter the road, along with a corpse.It is quite the enigmatic opener, a variant on those puzzlers that begin with a body sprawled on the parlor floor next to a bloody candelabrum. But there’s no clever detective to put the pieces together. (You have to do that yourself.) There’s also no obvious narrative blueprint and precious little exposition. There are instead beauties, mysteries and characters, like that passenger, Teresa (Bárbara Colen), who arrives in Bacurau on the day of a funeral. As Teresa walks through the seemingly empty town, dragging a suitcase, she passes its boozy doctor, Domingas (Sônia Braga, the one and only). And then Teresa hails a man who pops a hallucinogen in her mouth.The filmmakers spend the first half of the movie introducing the town of Bacurau; they drop you in the middle of it — without an evident story — then nose around its streets and secrets. There’s a pretty white church, but it’s used for storage, and a sturdy little museum built of stone. More characters pop in, including Teresa’s sexy friend, Acácio (Thomas Aquino), who has bedroom eyes and a gun in his waistband. He may be a thief or an insurgent; it’s hard to tell. Bacurau’s younger inhabitants like to watch a recording of him executing people. It looks like a video game and this is the future, but life is still cruel, as is evident once more bloody corpses start piling up.In his earlier features, Mendonça Filho used different spaces and homes — a middle-class neighborhood, a derelict plantation, an apartment threatened with demolition — as conduits to ideas about history, community, surveillance and power. These same issues swirl through “Bacurau,” which eventually settles into a brutal, disturbing story about haves and have-nots, a social division that Mendonça Filho and Dornelles make ferociously literal. This can be read as a metaphor about Brazil (and the inequities that trouble the larger world), but like Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” this is also a story deeply rooted in a precisely mapped place.That place is Brazil’s backcountry or sertão and, even more specifically, a quilombo, one of the many settlements originally founded by escaped enslaved people. In “Bacurau,” the filmmakers have created a version of a settlement that Mendonça Filho, in an interview with Film Comment, called a “remixed quilombo”: “a black community, a historical place of resistance, but with some white, indigenous, trans and other inhabitants.” When, midway through, some townspeople begin practicing capoeira — a combat game that originated with enslaved Africans — they are both communing with that history of defiance and readying for a new battle.Right before things heat up, two ominous strangers ride up to Bacurau. Like latter-day cowboys, they wander into a modest store filled with hanging animal carcasses and buzzing flies, a setting that’s as unassuming as it is skin-crawlingly creepy (much like this movie). When one of the strangers asks the female proprietor what the villagers are called, her son shouts “people!” The proprietor then explains that the town is named for a bird, and the stranger asks if it’s extinct. Not here, the Bacurau woman says with a smile — it comes out at night and it is a hunter.When the fight finally arrives it’s by turns absurd and horrifying. The second half of “Bacurau” is unsparing in its violence, filled with gunfire, terror in the night and revolutionary fervor that skews pathological. There’s a bandit in eyeliner, a fierce squirt (Silvero Pereira), and a gang of Americans right out of a Hollywood blowout. After an hour of silky camera moves, amusing details and a deep sense of history, Mendonça Filho and Dornelles switch gears, fold in a homage to John Carpenter and go berserk, unleashing a nightmare that’s all the worse for being eerily like life.BacurauNot rated. In Portuguese and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 11 minutes. More

When a comet passes near the earth’s atmosphere in the dour dystopian thriller “Only,” it first brings falling ash and then a virus that is usually fatal to women. Millions of women across the globe perish, and survivors are forced into hiding. It’s a grim concept that “Only” embraces with fatiguing fidelity.In flashback, Eva (Freida Pinto) and Will (Leslie Odom Jr.) are depicted as a lovey-dovey couple, celebrating years together and making plans for the future. But when the pandemic strikes, Will insists they go into quarantine. He obsessively disinfects and shutters their city apartment, and protects Eva from the hostile authorities.[embedded content]The story begins on the 400th day of their sequestration. Based on the silence of her chat room for survivors, Eva may be the last woman in the world. When the police come looking for her, Eva and Will flee to the countryside, a barren landscape that at least gives them room to breathe.The writer-director Takashi Doscher forgoes apocalyptic spectacle to focus on the pandemic’s effects on Will and Eva’s romance. Too bad. Most of the scenes could have been lifted from a generic relationship drama, and it is only the couple’s conversation, not their visually desaturated world, that distinguishes them. The saving grace of this often enervating thriller is that Doscher grants time for his actors to build character and intimacy, and both Pinto and Odom offer warm, affectingly natural performances as two people facing the end of their world.OnlyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. More

“Run This Town,” a jagged, snappy procedural that splits its time between a downsizing newspaper and a dysfunctional city government, is a fictionalized account of an actual scandal. In 2013, The Toronto Star and Gawker both said their reporters had watched a video that appeared to show Toronto’s mayor, Rob Ford, smoking crack. Six months later, he admitted to having used the drug, but did not resign..Bram (Ben Platt), a young journalist who writes listicles for a Toronto news outlet, is clearly out of his depth when he meets a potential source who wants to sell him the video. The movie, which ends with Bram delivering a self-righteous, mostly unmotivated defense of his generation’s work ethic, takes a weirdly sympathetic attitude toward his stumbles.The film is much sharper at city hall, where the two other major characters work. Kamal (Mena Massoud), the special assistant to the mayor, gleefully demonstrates his reporter-stonewalling strategies to Ashley (Nina Dobrev), a new press aide. She eagerly runs interference for the mayor until he shows up at work drunk and grabs her lewdly. Damian Lewis plays Ford, whose name is not changed, in a surprisingly effective feat of prosthetics.[embedded content]Making energetic use of split screens, the writer-director Ricky Tollman shows a gift for staccato cutting and clipped dialogue, as in a spirited discussion of terminology at city hall. Tollman is savvier on such details than on the big picture: The movie never quite reconciles its assorted perspectives into a coherent point of view.Run This TownRunning time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Rated R for language, inappropriate workplace behavior and talk of drugs. More