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      ‘No Fear, No Die’: Claire Denis’s Noir Comes Home to Roost

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      The French filmmaker’s confident third feature has been largely overlooked. Thankfully, a newly restored version is getting its first New York run since 1992.Most celebrated for “Beau Travail,” her sensuous transposition of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” to an African outpost of France’s Foreign Legion, Claire Denis could be the strongest French filmmaker of the post-New Wave generation. She is certainly the greatest risk-taker — unafraid to eroticize her male actors, unleash outré violence, or subsume an elusive narrative in a fiercely lyrical force field.“No Fear, No Die,” made nearly a decade before “Beau Travail,” does all three. Newly restored, the film is now at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, its first New York run since 1992. Few revivals are more deserving.Introduced when Denis was still relatively unknown, as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center series “Eurobeat: Blacks in European Cinema,” the movie was well received at the time. (Caryn James’s New York Times review in 1992 called it “exquisite in its own tough-minded way.”) Still, even as Denis’s stature has grown, her confident third feature has been largely overlooked.“No Fear, No Die” might be described as doubly noir. Set in a sketchy demimonde, it takes its epigraph from the sometime crime writer Chester Himes’s memoir “My Life of Absurdity”: “Every human being, whatever his race, nationality, religion or politics, is capable of anything and everything.” The main characters are two former colonial subjects. Dah (Isaach de Bankolé, featured in several Denis films, including her first “Chocolat”) is from Benin; his partner Jocelyn (Alex Descas) from Martinique.The action is largely confined to a glorified truck stop disco in a dingy Paris suburb. The club’s shady white owner Pierre (Jean-Claude Brialy) plans to use the joint as an arena for cockfights. The sport is illegal in France, if not Martinique, where Pierre formerly lived and, as he makes abundantly clear, enjoyed the favors of Jocelyn’s mother.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      BAM Announces Artistic Director and Fall Season Lineup

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      BAM, which has faced cutbacks in recent years, unveiled a reorganization as it announced its Next Wave Festival for the fall.The Brooklyn Academy of Music, a haven for international artists and the avant-garde that has been forced to reduce its programming and lay off workers in recent years, unveiled plans for a reorganization on Thursday as it announced its fall season.The institution said that Amy Cassello, who has been with BAM for more than a decade, would officially become its artistic director, a position she had been holding on an interim basis. And it announced a new strategic plan that calls for programming more works that are still in development, establishing more partnerships with other presenting institutions and hiring a new community-focused “resident curator.”BAM executives said they hoped that the plan would help usher in a new era for the institution after an exceptionally difficult period.Like many nonprofit arts organizations, BAM has struggled financially since the pandemic, and its annual operating budget dropped. It has also been buffeted by leadership churn in recent years after decades of stability in its senior leadership ranks.“I’m feeling really confident about our future,” said Gina Duncan, BAM’s president since 2022. “We were able to gain alignment across all of BAM’s communities and really arrive at a point in which we had a shared understanding of our history and what the future holds for us.”The upcoming Next Wave Festival in the fall will have 11 events, up from eight in 2023, a difficult year when BAM laid off 13 percent of its staff to help fill what officials called a “sizable structural deficit.” But it will still not be as robust as it was in earlier eras, when the festival regularly staged many more programs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      The Techno Pioneer Jeff Mills Blazes a Trail to Space, and Beyond

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      At 60, the D.J. and producer is inspiring fresh generations with new work, including an LP that approximates the experience of traveling through a black hole.During a recent performance by Tomorrow Comes the Harvest that had some attendees dancing in the aisles at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, a thrilling rhythmic conversation began between the percussionist Sundiata O.M., who was playing African talking drums, and the Detroit techno pioneer Jeff Mills, who tapped out beats on a Roland TR-909 drum machine. Over a 90-minute set, the musicians boldly blended techno, jazz and modern classical, embodying the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s famous credo “Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future.”Tomorrow Comes the Harvest began in 2018 as a collaboration between Mills and the Afrobeat originator Tony Allen, Fela’s longtime drummer. Despite their stylistic differences, they created a sonic language — based around total improvisation, not typically a techno hallmark — that Mills found so fruitful, he wanted to continue it even after Allen’s 2020 death. “My hope,” Mills said, during an interview backstage, “is that Tomorrow Comes the Harvest becomes an approach to play music — not always the same sound, but the idea of figuring it out while playing.”Mills has blazed a singular trail over the past four decades: from his 1980s roots as the Detroit nightclub and FM radio D.J. the Wizard to his early 1990s period with the politically conscious Motor City techno collective Underground Resistance to his solo work helping define the sleek, stripped-down minimal techno genre. While always known as a dazzling D.J., Mills has continually expanded his horizons beyond the booth, including on high-concept album projects that began with “Discovers the Rings of Saturn” from the group X-102 in 1992, up through his new LP, “The Trip — Enter the Black Hole,” released last week on vinyl via his own Axis label.Mills lifted Tomorrow Comes the Harvest’s name from a phrase coined by the science fiction author Octavia Butler, who was describing the potential power of seeds, properly sown, to influence the future. The metaphor seems apt for Mills’s entire career, which has inspired generations of electronic musicians, like Mali Mase, a 25-year-old D.J. and producer who releases music as Sweater on Polo.“To me, Jeff Mills is someone who exhibits mastery, not only in techno, but all forms of expressions he explores,” said Mase, who spun a set dedicated to Mills during the 2023 edition of Dweller, a Black-centered annual techno festival in New York. “It would be so simple for him to sit back and bask in the spectacle of his own greatness. Instead, he challenges the forms established, reinvents, and still beats it sicker than anyone on a drum machine.”Mills said he hopes that Tomorrow Comes the Harvest “becomes an approach to play music — not always the same sound, but the idea of figuring it out while playing.”Edwina HayWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Pressure’: The ‘Mean Streets’ of Brixton

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      Newly restored, Horace Ové’s film about a Trinidadian family in London makes a triumphant return to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.The title “Pressure” suggests the force with which this first feature by the Trinidadian British director Horace Ové struck the conscience of a country. The movie, which premiered at the 1975 London Film Festival, was praised by critics and then shelved for three years. Apparently, its producer, the British Film Institute, deemed the public unready for Ové’s blunt depiction of the police violence and racial animus directed at London’s West Indian residents in Brixton.The film’s landmark status has since been recognized by the institute and its maker knighted. Newly restored, the movie is making a triumphant return to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where a 16-millimeter version was previously shown in 2016.With consummate irony, “Pressure” was originally titled “The Immigrant.” Anxiously watched by his Trinidadian family, Tony (Herbert Norville), born and educated in London, attempts to join, and is repeatedly rejected by, the white British world. His mother (Lucita Lijertwood), an overworked house cleaner, is perpetually, vociferously anxious. His father (Frank Singuineau), an accountant turned grocer, is resigned. His older brother, Colin (Oscar James), a Black Power militant who is unemployed, is contemptuous. (The casting mirrors the situation: All but Norville were born in Trinidad.)Written with the Trinidadian novelist Samuel Selvon, “Pressure” is a didactic film, opening with Tony’s mother frying up a traditional English breakfast, with greasy bacon shown in unappetizing close-up, triggering Colin’s disdain for the local cuisine. (He peels and devours an avocado swiped from his father’s store.)Venturing out, Tony, the first-generation Briton, is exposed to Brixton life — suffering a painful job interview, a landlady’s racist diatribe and a Black preacher who urges his congregation to “drive all black thoughts from your hearts.” Alongside these set pieces, neorealist footage captures white reactions to the Black people they pass on the street. Indeed, the streets provide Tony’s education in double consciousness. “Learn how to thieve constructively — for the struggle,” Colin scolds him when Tony is naïvely caught up in a bungled shoplifting caper.Colin likes to posture. His associate Sister Louise (the American actor Sheila Scott-Wilkinson) provides the speechifying. Her political line, racially aware and class-conscious — synthesizing the thinking of two Trinidadian activists Ové admired, the Black Power firebrand Stokely Carmichael and the internationalist historian C.L.R. James — brings down the power of the state in the form of riot police.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jacqueline Woodson’s ‘The Other Side and ‘Show Way’ Go to BAM

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      A dance performance of “The Other Side” and a musical adaptation of “Show Way” head to the Brooklyn stage for young audiences.Jacqueline Woodson has always seen her books while she writes them, visualizing what the characters look like, how they might speak and move. “I imagine them line by line,” she said during a recent phone interview. “I see the pictures.”A prolific author of books for young people (and in later years, for adults), Woodson has won nearly every award possible for a children’s author: the Coretta Scott King award, a National Book award, many Newbery medals, a MacArthur grant. A few of those books have been staged, filmed or set to music. Since Woodson was named the Kennedy Center’s Education Artist-in-Residence in 2021, more have been adapted. Soon, the Brooklyn Academy of Music will bring two of those Kennedy Center productions, “Show Way the Musical” and “The Other Side,” to its Fishman Space. So now audiences in Brooklyn, where Woodson has long lived, can see these books, too.“Song and dance get inside of you in a different way,” she said approvingly. “Adding the dimension of music and movement to that narration touches us in a much deeper and more radiant way.”“The Other Side,” with choreography by Hope Boykin and a score by Ali Jackson, will have four performances this weekend. “Show Way the Musical,” with music and lyrics by Tyrone L. Robinson, runs March 16-17. Recommended for children 7 and older, each deals with difficult subject matter. “The Other Side,” about a Black girl and a white girl who live on opposite sides of a fence, addresses segregation. “Show Way,” a history of the women in Woodson’s family and the quilt they sewed, touches on enslavement. But both are ultimately hopeful, at times even joyful.“Show Way the Musical,” with music and lyrics by Tyrone L. Robinson, is a history of the women in Woodson’s family and the quilt they sewed.Kyle Schick / Elman StudioAmy Cassello, BAM’s interim artistic director, believes in art as a way to help young viewers understand this history, however fraught. “It sets the scene for learning and openness and understanding,” she said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Lumumba: Death of a Prophet’: Revisiting a Mythic Figure

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      The 1990 documentary about Patrice Lumumba by Raoul Peck (“I Am Not Your Negro”), showing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, looks and feels newly minted.“If the prophet dies, so does the future,” the director Raoul Peck says early in “Lumumba: Death of a Prophet.” The movie, a personal essay in the form of a history lesson, is as much a poem as it is a documentary.Made in 1990 and showing for a week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in a 4K restoration of the original 16-millimeter film, “Death of a Prophet” looks and feels newly minted.Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of the former Belgian Congo, was brought down after a few months in power by internecine rivalry, hysterical anti-Communism and imperialist greed. His fate was sealed in the post-independence ceremonies when he followed the patronizing speech by King Baudouin of Belgium with a blunt j’accuse, citing Belgian racism and “colonial oppression.”A civil war ensued. With Belgian support, the mineral-rich Katanga province was encouraged by Belgian mining interests to secede, and the white-dominated Force Publique, the Belgian colonial army, revolted. Ridiculed and vilified in the Western press, Lumumba — who would be hailed by Malcolm X as “the greatest Black man who ever walked the African continent” — was killed in early 1961 after being undermined by the United Nations and betrayed by his allies, including his successor, the strongman Joseph-Désiré Mobutu.For Peck, best known for his essayistic James Baldwin documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” made in 2017, Lumumba is a mythic figure. Peck spent his early childhood in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where, as Francophones, his Haitian parents had been recruited to bolster the post-independence professional class.As noted by Stephen Holden, who reviewed “Death of a Prophet” in The New York Times when the movie was shown during the 1992 New York Film Festival, Peck “boldly” inserts himself into the film. He not only narrates but often cites his mother’s account of events, puts the exorbitant fee charged by a British newsreel for a few minutes of footage in the context of a Congolese worker’s average salary and explains his last-minute cancellation of plans to film in Zaire, as Congo came to be called under Mobutu.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Bark of Millions’ Review: Taylor Mac’s Rock Opera at BAM

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      If Taylor Mac and Matt Ray’s four-hour rock opera were aiming to succeed on aural gorgeousness and visual spectacle alone, there would be no cause to quibble.Somewhere close to the four-hour mark in “Bark of Millions,” the polychromatic cavalcade of splendor that is Taylor Mac and Matt Ray’s new rock opera, I finally realized why the woman in front of me had been reading on her phone throughout the performance. And why she had looked at me like I was way out of line when I couldn’t bear the glowing screen any longer, leaned forward and implored her to stop.The words on her phone were excerpts from the show’s lyrics, a free digital version of the printed fan deck on sale at concessions. More than 50 songs in, she was grasping at that text in an attempt to follow along. Because the great frustration of “Bark of Millions,” which continues through Saturday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, is that there are far too many songs in which the music drowns out the lyrics, making the meaning a bafflement. (Sound design is by Brendan Aanes.) In those moments, time decelerates.If “Bark of Millions” were aiming to succeed on aural gorgeousness and visual spectacle alone, there would be no cause to quibble. Those are plentiful in Ray’s genre-hopping music, richly interpreted by the band he directs, and in Machine Dazzle’s ingeniously odd costumes, such as the sparkly pastel number in which Mac begins the evening, looking like Weird Barbie as an acid-tinged sprite, dressed for Versailles by way of ’60s Vegas.But Mac’s vivid, often poetic lyrics are not incidental. In the creation of the score, they were the starting point, each of the 55 songs inspired by a figure in queer history. It is a mosaic of a show, inherently political in its affirmation of queer heritage and community, though as Mac tells the audience, it is not a history lesson: “We beg you not to Google in your seats.”From left, Jack Fuller, Mama Alto and Thornetta Davis.Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesStill, there are degrees of mystery, and I do not believe that “Bark of Millions” — which Mac, its principal director, describes aptly in a program note as “an opera-concert-song-cycle-musical-performance-art-piece-play” — means to leave us so much in the dark.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Musical Force Behind the Communal, Queer ‘Bark of Millions’

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      Matt Ray is a prolific songwriter and the musical nexus of New York’s alt-cabaret scene. His next project: Taylor Mac’s latest marathon performance.“It’s the last hour, and I’m feeling the energy draining,” Taylor Mac, the performing arts polymath, announced near the end of a recent rehearsal at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.If the artists — an ensemble of a dozen singers, as well as several instrumentalists — were exhausted, it was because of the sheer scale of what they were working on: “Bark of Millions,” a show by Mac and the musician Matt Ray, which has its American premiere on Monday at BAM’s Harvey Theater. Essential to that scale is Ray’s score of 55 original songs that add up to four hours of performance.That would be enough to fill several albums by any recording artist, and yet it’s business as usual for Ray. He has been not only the musical core of Mac’s recent shows — the daylong marathon “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” for which he arranged over 240 songs with the purpose of queering the American canon, and “The Hang,” for which he wrote 26 — but he has also been the force behind much of New York’s alt-cabaret scene, with collaborators including Justin Vivian Bond, Joey Arias and Bridget Everett.“This is a community of risk-takers and rule-breakers,” Everett said in an interview. “It’s a really exciting, vital scene. And there’s one person who’s the musical nexus of that. It’s Matt. His heart is beating at the center of all of it.”The performer Justin Vivian Bond called Ray “such a sensitive artist,” and said, “for being a consummate Leo, he’s just great at letting other people shine.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRAY, 51, has had expansive taste in music since his childhood growing up on the East Coast. Whether as a player — he started learning the piano when he was 2 years old — or as a listener, he never limited himself to any one genre. “I really admire monochromatic types of work,” he said, “but I just don’t work that way.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More