Movies

LONDON — How should a video exhibition be? In light-filled galleries optimized for painting and sculpture, moving images can get lost: diminished to washed-out projections, or exiled to old, round-edged monitors. Video, film and other moving-image works need the same care as other media to look right in a museum — and they don’t always get it.Any biennial habitué knows the experience of walking jetlagged from white cube to black box, and discovering some three-hour documentary projected in poor light conditions without even a bench for seating. Or the bank of 13-inch televisions, below eye level, with cheap headphones attached. Video art is more than 50 years old now, but you can still hear museumgoers — not just modern art haters, but committed cinephiles — brush off the whole premise of exhibiting video in art galleries: “If I wanted to watch a film I’d go to a movie theater …”Well, Steve McQueen works both in museums and movie theaters — and the Amsterdam-based British artist knows very well which space is which. Having won broad acclaim as a feature film director (and netting the Oscar for best picture for “12 Years a Slave”), Mr. McQueen has never abandoned his first career as a fine artist, and he presents his moving image works with a careful, sometimes even fanatical, attention to their conditions of display.Looped or linear, projected at small scale or filling a wall, McQueen’s art manifests the same cool exactitude as his movies “Hunger” or “Shame,” and his admirers from the multiplex ought to take the time to discover his immersive, elusive fine art in the darkened galleries of Tate Modern.The show is something less than a mid-career retrospective, on the order of his praised-to-the-skies 2013 exhibition at the Schaulager in Basel. It includes only 14 works. It leaves out nearly all the film installations he made before winning the Turner Prize in 1999, and also omits important recent works like “Gravesend” (2007), an icy, abstract exploration of global capital filmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo.But these 14 works — 11 of which are projected films and videos — come together into a meticulously choreographed exhibition that sticks up for the projected image as a medium in its own right. They’ve been installed out of chronological order, some in dedicated galleries but many in an open space, where they flicker, stutter and reflect one another, accumulating into an intense oeuvre that obsesses over authority, confinement, the body (of black men, particularly) and the state.Mr. McQueen’s art can be intense or slight, but it merits the rare attention it’s getting here. On the day I went, dozens of visitors stayed to watch Mr. McQueen’s works for two hours or more.Most of this show’s videos are projected on a loop, which you can look at freely, but two are projected at set times and can only be seen from the beginning. (Guards are stationed at the entrances; both are about 25 minutes and run on the half-hour.)One of those is the murky, claustrophobic, absolutely relentless “Western Deep” (2002), hands-down Mr. McQueen’s greatest work in either art or cinema. Commissioned for Okwui Enwezor’s now legendary Documenta 11 exhibition of 2002, “Western Deep” drives us into the underworld of the global economy, via a descent into the world’s deepest mine, the TauTona goldmine near Johannesburg.Its first shot unspools in near darkness, as we go down with the miners down a near-infinite elevator, espying their faces only in flashes, listening for minutes to the screech and rattle of the machinery. (Long takes are a McQueen signature, preserved in “Hunger” and “12 Years a Slave.”)This is the heart of darkness, retained in South Africa’s post-apartheid state. Beneath the earth, the miners hazardously loose gold from the mine walls, but we see their labor only in flashes, whatever their headlamps allow. Mr. McQueen’s cuts are awkward and disjunctive, plunging us in and out of the mine; the sound oscillates between the clatter of the mining equipment and an even more disturbing silence.At last, surfacing, we behold a terrifying (and unexplained) sequence of dozens of miners stripped to their boxers, performing calisthenics as doctors pace alongside, intercut with a blinking red light and a horribly loud buzzer. We learn nothing of these men’s lives, nor, for that matter, of the profits of the mining company.“Western Deep” denies us the pat liberal satisfactions of documentary, and forces us, with its harrowing soundtrack and flashes of color and darkness, to look in the face of an economy that strips humanity to bare life. (I’d seen it before, but after watching it again I still had to lean against a wall to catch my breath.)Mr. McQueen shot “Western Deep” with a Super-8 camera — the only one small enough to take underground, 20 years ago — and converted the footage to video, with all its graininess conserved. It’s projected here on a giant screen, with a booming sound system, faced by custom-built bleachers. And these conditions matter — not just for the comfort and focus of the spectators, but the very meaning of his art.Ask yourself here: Is the film projected on a fixed screen, or does it stretch to the ceiling and floor, creating an installation? Or else does the screen hang in the center of a gallery, encouraging you to circle it like a sculpture? Is the projector visible — and, if it’s spooling celluloid rather than video, is it an antiquated projector? Are the gallery walls white, like a gallery for painting, or black, like a theater?These are an artist’s questions. And in part because of his recent success in the movie business, the Tate’s McQueen exhibition seems to foreground these matters of display — and, with them, the ways of watching that a moving-image work demands and deserves. Certainly compared with other British video artists of his generation (think of Douglas Gordon, say, or Jeremy Deller), Mr. McQueen has been fastidious about what happens to his art films after the final cut.That fastidiousness is more for visual and practical reasons than theoretical ones; he has never been an especially conceptual filmmaker. “Static” (2009), an overrated two-projection view of the Statue of Liberty shot from a helicopter, remains a thin and undemanding work despite its elegant cinematography. “Charlotte” (2004), a close-up loop of Mr. McQueen’s finger probing the open eye of Charlotte Rampling, is a literally pale imitation of Buñuel’s “Un Chien Andalou.”He also doesn’t have a touch for more traditional media; this show’s only sculpture, a prison bed draped with a 24-karat gold mosquito net, looks like a ripoff of the British-based Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum, and a cheap souvenir of Mr. McQueen’s engagement, from “Western Deep” to “12 Years a Slave,” with the denial of freedom.But in “Ashes” (2015), the most accomplished of his most recent video works, Mr. McQueen confirms that his movie years have not dulled his sensitivity or his style. On one side of a suspended screen, he projects archival footage he shot in 2002 in Grenada of a beautiful young man nicknamed Ashes, sitting on the prow of a fishing boat, smiling, carefree, lost in blue. On the other side, more recent footage recounts Ashes’s death and burial in a pauper’s grave.His story, recounted in voiceover, has only the barest details; it would never be optioned by a Hollywood studio. But on gritty 8-millimeter fim he is preserved, looped for eternity as he sails to a future he will never reach.“Ashes” is a melancholy, magisterial work, of big dreams and sudden death. It can only be appreciated properly in a gallery, with one’s body as well as one’s eyes. (It echoes the earlier, single-shot “7 Nov.,” also here, in which the artist’s cousin Marcus recounts the excruciating tale of accidentally shooting his brother.) So too “Western Deep,” which you can easily screen in bootleg form with a quick Google search, but which re-emerges at the Tate as a corporeal experience, rattling your ears and accelerating your pulse. They make demands of you in ways that only the best art does, and that, in the age of Instagram, happens less and less.Funny, given how much time I spend worrying about the role of the cameraphone in contemporary art, that I never thought of this. But here it is: Video art, once dumbly condemned by traditionalists as a mass-media takeover of the fine art gallery, now offers more of an escape from the hellscape of our digital feeds than other artistic media.The real digitally fluent medium of our time is painting, which functions all too well as just another class of shareable content. Performance and installation can slip into the social photo stream as easily as beachside selfies. But in the darkness of the video gallery, with my phone in my pocket, Mr. McQueen was offering me, at least in his best works, a rediscovery of slowness.Steve McQueenThrough May 9 at Tate Modern, London; tate.org.uk. More

Nick Apollo Forte, the actor and cruise-ship singer best known for playing the over-the-hill crooner Lou Canova in Woody Allen’s 1984 movie “Broadway Danny Rose,” died on Feb. 26 in Waterbury, Conn., where he was born. He was 81.His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his daughter Lynn Coleman.Mr. Forte had a very brief acting career, appearing in “Broadway Danny Rose” as a burly (6 foot 1, 235 pounds) has-been musician with a big ego and a drinking problem who becomes a client of Danny Rose (Woody Allen), a bottom-feeding small-time agent and personal manager whose stable of talent includes skating penguins, a balloon act and a woman who plays melodies on water glasses.With Danny coaching him (“Don’t forget to do ‘My Funny Valentine’ with the special lyrics about the moon landing!”) Lou finesses his way out of the Catskills and into the Waldorf Astoria, where they get caught in a love triangle with a brassy blonde named Tina Vitale (Mia Farrow).“Mr. Forte, who was himself a singer of the ruffled-shirt school when recruited for the movie, is an absolute natural,” Janet Maslin wrote in her review in The New York Times. “He blusters through his role with the absolute confidence that is the essential — perhaps the only — ingredient in Lou’s mystique.”Except for some key differences — like Lou’s brown hair (his strawberry blonde curls were dyed), gold chains and drinking problem — Mr. Forte’s character was not all that unlike Mr. Forte himself: He had spent 30 years performing in cabarets, nightclubs and hotel lounges before he was discovered by Mr. Allen’s casting agent.While looking for someone to play the part, the casting agent found an album that Mr. Forte had released under his own label, titled “Images.” (Mr. Allen ended up using two songs from the album in the movie, both written by Mr. Forte: “Agita,” about indigestion, and “My Bambina,” written for his daughter Robin’s wedding.)“The casting agent called Mr. Forte to ask him for a résumé and a recent photograph,” The Times reported in 1984. “Mr. Forte did not have a résumé, so he took ‘a little piece of paper,’ he said, and scribbled: ‘I’m a nightclub entertainer. I write music. I produce records.’ And, he added, ‘I fish.’”After shooting the movie Mr. Forte admitted that he had barely known who Mr. Allen was when he agreed to work on the project.“While we were making the movie, I said to him: ‘Wood, I can’t put you on. I’ve never seen one of your movies in my life,’” Mr. Forte said. “And he says to me, ‘You are a very disturbed individual.’”Nicola Antonio Forte was born in Waterbury on June 14, 1938, to Nicola and Carmela (Capizutto) Forte. His father was a factory worker, his mother a homemaker.Mr. Forte got his first big break in 1957, opening for Della Reese at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Shortly after, he dropped out of high school to pursue music, changing his stage name from Nicky Redman to Nick Apollo Forte in honor of the venue.He met Rosalie Trapasso when they were teenagers, and they married in 1958. They had seven children.Mr. Forte continued to perform in cabarets and nightclubs after “Broadway Rose” and spent 15 years headlining on cruise ships.Besides his daughter Lynn, he is survived by his wife; three other daughters, Robin McCormack, Carmel Natelli and Shelly Giannini; his sons, Nicholas, Mark and Jeffery; his brother, Frank Dest; his sister, Aurelia Battista; 22 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.Mr. Forte, who rarely strayed from Waterbury when not on the road, made the most of his moment in the spotlight.“Now everybody wants to be my friend, and they all want to hear my life story,” he told The Times in 1984.“Well, this is it,” he said. “I’ve lived my whole life in one square mile of this town. I was born in this house and I’ll probably die in it. But I made a movie and I never knew I could. Now I can walk into any major record label. It’s Nick Apollo Forte. He can walk in now.” More

“The Banker” plucks an obscure figure out of history to very mixed effect. Set largely before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it tells the story of an African-American entrepreneur, Bernard S. Garrett, as he takes on racism in real estate and banking. It’s an appealing David and Goliath setup that uses laughs, white racism and black righteousness to soft-sell a tale of inequality, heroic capitalism and eye-drooping mathematics. (It’s inspired by real events that legal records suggest may be more complicated.)Anthony Mackie leads the charm offensive as Bernard, a Texas-born striver. Bernard has big plans when he and his wife, Eunice (Nia Long), move their tiny family to Los Angeles. It’s 1954 and to Bernard the City of Angels looks like a great opportunity, despite its discriminatory housing practices. With his customary calm, he is soon walking its pleasantly green, racially segregated streets, trying and failing to buy fairly priced properties, and then trying and failing to secure loans for pricier ones.The story starts humming once Bernard meets Joe Morris (Samuel L. Jackson, having a demonstrably good time). A businessman with deep pockets and a joint called the Plantation Club, Joe enters in a swirl of jazz and smoke amid a bounty of women. He makes a useful contrast with the buttoned-down Bernard, who finds him vulgar. But Joe is a relief — funny, prickly, human — and the film could use more of him. Naturally, the men join forces. And, thrusting and parrying, they realize Bernard’s plan of buying, renovating and renting homes in white areas to the city’s growing black middle class.[embedded content]The director, George Nolfi, who wrote the script with several others, tries to fill in the larger sociopolitical picture while keeping the story grounded in the personal. It’s rough going, especially when Nolfi tries to make the case that Bernard is a revolutionary figure when he mostly comes across as a self-interested entrepreneur with politics that sound like movie lines. Still, Nolfi keeps swinging in that direction, stodgily dramatizing Bernard’s efforts as Eunice smiles and delivers wifely pep talks. It’s hard not to root for them even if they’re obvious and underdeveloped, burdened with dialogue that too often sounds programmatic rather than embodied.Bernard’s dreams and the political stakes expand once he decides to take on the banking establishment. Together with an eager, inexperienced white colleague, Matt Steiner (Nicholas Hoult, all big eyes, golly gee and aw shucks), Bernard and Joe devise an elaborate subterfuge to buy a bank building, thus becoming the landlords to the very moneymen who deny loans to black clients. To pull this off, they turn Matt into their front. Going full-on Henry Higgins, they teach him how to deal with wealthy white people, instruction that extends from the golf course to the dinner table. Joe shows Matt how to tee off; Eunice schools him on etiquette and seafood.The scenes of Matt’s education are diverting and overly ingratiating, characterized by snappy edits and broadly deployed comedy. The metamorphosis drags on — it takes too long for Matt to stumble toward competency, body and fairway turf flying — but it also captures the performative aspect of race. What makes these interactions stick with you aren’t their laughs, but the vision of African-Americans’ patiently dispensing life lessons to a white naïf. Bernard, Joe and Eunice aren’t simply teaching Matt how to play, dress and eat. They are also, movingly, explaining how to navigate white power, something that they have had to do all their lives.This lesson lingers as the story shifts back to Texas, the subterfuge continues and the deals grow bigger and far fuzzier. What doesn’t change is Bernard, whose inner life remains opaque, even as the complications mount and he bluntly speaks truth to power. He remains more of a nice idea for a character, a mystery that the film never manages to crack. This perhaps helps explain why Nolfi circles once too often back to Matt, who marries, settles down, tests his own ambitions and finally helps blur the story’s focus and blunt its messaging. For a film about the struggles of a black man in America, “The Banker” spends an awful lot of time on a false white front.The BankerRated PG-13 for institutional racism. Running time: 2 hours. More