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      Using Film to Tell a Personal History of America and Race

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      With “Who We Are,” the lecturer Jeffery Robinson and the directors Emily and Sarah Kunstler follow in the tradition of documentaries that excavate our past.For over a decade, Jeffery Robinson has been telling an unvarnished history of the United States in an ever-evolving lecture presentation. His talks, now presented as part of his organization, the Who We Are Project, delve into how racism against Black people was bound up with the country’s legacy since its founding. The new documentary, “Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America,” captures Robinson’s eye-opening account (filmed at Town Hall in New York City) and intersperses interviews with civil rights figures and others from his travels across the country.The film, directed by Emily and Sarah Kunstler, joins a lineage of documentaries that excavate race and the histories of marginalized people in America, like Raoul Peck’s “I Am Not Your Negro” and Ava DuVernay’s “13th.”“This is not ‘Eyes on the Prize,’” Robinson said of the new movie, which is available on major digital platforms. “But I think it is a call to us being something radically different going forward.”Reviewing “Who We Are” for The Times, Ben Kenigsberg made it a Critic’s Pick and wrote, “It’s a confrontational film, but never an alienating one.”Robinson, a criminal defense lawyer by profession, was the director of the A.C.L.U.’s Trone Center for Justice and Equality in New York, and he remembers walking past the former Cotton Exchange on the way to work. I spoke with him and the Kunstlers (whose last feature, “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe,” was about their father, the civil rights attorney). These are excerpts from our interview.“Who We Are” partly aims to chart the role of white supremacy in U.S. history. How did you approach that?JEFFERY ROBINSON I say it as a rhetorical question in the film: “What if I said America was founded on white supremacy? Somebody might say, ‘Jeff, that’s really extreme.’” But when you read the words of the people that founded our country and see what they did, I think it’s an inescapable conclusion. Some people have said the Constitution was a compromise between those who wanted slavery and those who didn’t want slavery. This “compromise” protected the institution of slavery, gave the South extra congressional representatives and Electoral College votes to protect the institution of slavery, and made Black attempts to be free unconstitutional. It was unconstitutional for me to try and get away from my owner!SARAH KUNSTLER And they accomplished all of that without using the word slavery. We have a history of hiding what we mean as a country. When we enact laws preserving and maintaining white supremacy, we don’t actually say what it is that we’re doing.ROBINSON There is no way you can associate white supremacy with a law that says you cannot change the name of iconic monuments in the state of Alabama — until you understand that these are all monuments to slavery, essentially, and to people that enslaved people.Robinson with Josephine Bolling McCall, the author of a book about her father’s lynching in Alabama in 1947.Jesse Wakeman/Sony Pictures ClassicsThe film also uncovers the details of lived Black experience: for example, the fingerprints that enslaved builders left behind on walls they made.EMILY KUNSTLER The facts in the abstract don’t mean anything if you can’t connect them to actual human experience. Those fingerprints are one example of a monument to a history of lived experience of enslaved Black people in Charleston, S.C., and in fact, all over this country, that despite the best efforts to erase them, persist. The same way the foundations for the houses in Tulsa, Okla., [site of the 1921 massacre], still exist where the homes were never rebuilt.ROBINSON There was a moment when we were talking with Mother Randle [a survivor of the Tulsa massacre] and she was saying, “There was a pile of bodies.” There was just a chill that went up and down my spine — this woman over 100 years old going back to that memory in her life.Jeffery, how did it feel to share your, and your family’s, experiences of racism, like the school basketball game where the hosts didn’t want you to play?ROBINSON We went to Dr. Tiffany Crutcher and asked her to talk about her feelings about her brother being killed on live television, practically, by the Tulsa police [in 2016]. And it felt like, All right, I should share something. Dick [a basketball coach who stuck up for Robinson] was 21 years old at the time this incident happened in Walls, Miss. This is just several years after civil rights workers got disappeared and murdered in Mississippi. Where he got the courage to handle that the way he did, I just don’t know. But it was clear that if I didn’t play, we were all leaving. And he wasn’t going to put that on me at 12 years old. I think he saw me as essentially his younger brother.Could you talk about including the conversation about slavery with a man you encountered at a Confederate statue who represented Flags Across the South, the pro-Confederate flag group?EMILY KUNSTLER I felt like it encompassed the thesis of the film. I asked Jeff, “Do you think that that gentleman could be reached?” And Jeff said, “I don’t know if he can be reached, but I know that if nobody tries, he certainly won’t be.” There’s value in making the effort, there’s value in laying out the facts and continuing to do so. We can’t be frightened into silence by people who think differently, speak very loudly, and come out in force and wave Confederate flags.ROBINSON The conversation didn’t go the way he perhaps thought it was going to go in terms of me getting angry at him or something. There’s a little twitch in his face as we were leaving, and I think we at least made some wheels turn in his head.How does the movie relate to the controversy around laws banning the teaching of certain American history?ROBINSON The first time we met in person to talk about this [movie] was June 20, 2017. No one was even talking about CRT [Critical Race Theory] back then. It would have been like, “What is that, a breakfast cereal or something?” So this was not done in response to those laws. But those laws coming up can tell you how afraid people are of the information that’s in this film.This goes to the concept of “the minds of the rising generation.” All the way back in 1837, John C. Calhoun, one of the most virulent racists in American history, was saying that we can’t teach children in school about the abolition of slavery, because if we teach that, slavery is done for. The day before the [Trump] administration left office, they put out something called “The 1776 Report” that talked about a return to patriotic education, and they use the exact same quote that John C. Calhoun did: “the minds of the rising generation.”SARAH KUNSTLER Before there were anti-CRT laws, there were textbook wars. So there’s an unending battle of what and how much our children are taught in school about our nation’s history. One of the most compelling things about Jeff’s talk is that he goes back to primary sources. You don’t need to just learn it in school. You can seek it out for yourself. More

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      ‘Babi Yar: Context’ Review: Unearthing Footage of a Nazi Massacre

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      Sergei Loznitsa’s new documentary, about the mass murder of Ukrainian Jews in 1941, arrives in theaters with a grim context of its own.Over two days in September, 1941, German soldiers, assisted by Ukrainian collaborators, murdered 33,771 Jews at the Babi Yar ravine outside Kyiv. The massacre was one of the earliest and deadliest episodes in what is sometimes called the “holocaust by bullets,” a phase of the Nazi genocide that took place outside the mechanized slaughter of the death camps. These mobile killing squads, known as Einsatzgruppen, are estimated to have taken at least 1.5 million lives.The Ukrainian-born filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa’s new documentary, consisting of archival footage interspersed with a few tersely informative title cards, is called “Babi Yar: Context.” What’s meant by “context” isn’t so much a broad, explanation of the event — such as one finds in the historian Timothy Snyder’s book “Bloodlands” — as a detailed visual narrative with a hole in the middle.When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, they brought movie cameras as well as rifles. So did the Soviet Army when it took back Kyiv in 1943. Some of those cameras were instruments of propaganda; others were wielded by amateurs. The two sides left behind an extensive cinematic record, a pool of images that have mostly languished unseen since the end of the war. Weaving them together and dubbing in sound (the rumble of tanks and the murmur of crowds, with an occasional snippet of intelligible speech), Loznitsa has assembled a wrenching and revelatory collage.The killing itself took place off camera. What is astonishing is how thoroughly nearly everything that happened before and after the massacre was documented, in black-and-white and sometimes in color. The detail is unsparing and relentless: farms and villages set on fire by German soldiers; Jews being rounded up, humiliated and beaten; snowy fields strewn with frozen corpses; bombs exploding in downtown Kyiv; the public hanging of 12 Germans convicted of atrocities after the war.Though there is a military and political narrative to be gleaned from all of this, Loznitsa’s method (displayed in earlier found-footage films like “State Funeral,” about the aftermath of Stalin’s death) is to allow the human reality to speak for itself. A few prominent officials are identified — you may recognize Nikita S. Khrushchev, who became the leader of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic soon after the Germans were driven out — but what the film displays most vividly is the intense individuality of anonymous, ordinary people. History is a catalog of faces: city-dwellers and peasants; victims, perpetrators and bystanders; Germans, Jews, Russians and Ukrainians.Mostly, these people don’t speak. Toward the end, there are scenes of courtroom testimony, during which a German soldier and several witnesses and survivors talk about what happened at Babi Yar. Their words, in the absence of images, have a harrowing intensity beyond what any pictures might convey. So does the Soviet Jewish writer Vasily Grossman’s 1943 essay “Ukraine Without Jews,” quoted onscreen to emphasize the enormity of what can’t be shown.Much of the rest of “Babi Yar: Context” works the other way around, finding an eloquence in actions and gestures that words might not supply. And also an element of indeterminacy, as you try to read the thoughts and feelings on those faces.There is a political, moral dimension to the work of interpretation that Loznitsa compels. After Kyiv, other cities like Lviv fall to the Germans; the streets fill with Ukrainians celebrating their victory as liberation from Soviet oppression. Girls in traditional costumes present bouquets of flowers to Nazi officers, and banners are hoisted proclaiming the glory of Adolf Hitler and the Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera. When Jews are rounded up, harassed and brutalized, local civilians are on hand to participate.Later, there are parades and flowers to welcome the Red Army. Hitler’s likeness is taken down and replaced with Stalin’s. You might wonder about the composition of the crowds. Did some of the same people who welcomed the German army as liberators also turn out to support the Soviet army’s return? Did residents of Kyiv who cheered the arrival of Nazi fighters also cheer their execution?Forcing you to think about these questions is one of the ways Loznitsa’s film draws you closer to the horror at its center, stripping away the easy judgment of hindsight as well as the layers of forgetting and distortion that accumulated around the massacre in subsequent decades.And of course “Babi Yar: Context,” completed before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, arrives in theaters with a grim context of its own. The Babi Yar Memorial near Kyiv was damaged in early March by a Russian missile. Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, has claimed that one of his goals is the “denazification” of Ukraine, whose current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish. The past that Loznitsa excavates casts its shadow on the present. Knowing about it won’t make anything easier, but not knowing can make everything worse.Babi Yar: ContextNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters. More

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      ‘Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King’ Review: Coins and Misdemeanors

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      In this sensationalist Netflix documentary, aggrieved users of a defunct cryptocurrency exchange grow convinced that the company’s head absconded with their money.Like a garden-variety con man, “Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King” relies on razzle-dazzle to deflect from an emptiness of insight. The documentary (on Netflix) centers on Gerald W. Cotten, the founder of a Canadian cryptocurrency exchange called Quadriga CX who died in 2018, leaving many users shut out from accessing their funds.The movie aligns viewers with a handful of Quadriga users who team up as amateur detectives on the case. One, speaking under the name QCXINT, wears a disguise to protect his identity. Another floods his YouTube channel with theories. As the men scour social media and trade motivating comments on message boards, the director Luke Sewell uses dim lighting and theatrical re-enactments to track their digital sleuthing with an outsized sense of drama and gravitas.For while Cotten’s death — which was not made public until a month afterward — is peculiar, it soon becomes clear that the aggrieved Quadriga users are uniquely unfit investigators of its mystery. Distrustful of authority, the men become keyboard vigilantes who, egging each other on, grow convinced that Cotten faked his death and absconded with their money.Sewell does speak to journalists and experts who offer some coherent analysis. Had the movie prioritized such clearheadedness over crude true crime tropes, it might have emerged as a sharp window into the dangers of speculation — both in the purchase of assets and on conspiratorial Reddit boards. Instead, this sensational documentary feels bankrupt at its core.Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto KingNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      How Film Forum Became the Best Little Movie House in New York

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      It’s just before 8 p.m. on a recent Friday night in Manhattan, and a crowd of moviegoers is lined up to see “Great Freedom” (2021), an Austrian film that tells the tender and terrible story of a concentration camp survivor in Germany who’s repeatedly imprisoned for his sexuality. Sebastian Meise, the film’s director, and its star, Franz Rogowski, will be giving a Q. and A. after the showing, so there’s a palpable sense that this is an event.Outside on West Houston Street, the glow of the marquee — “Film Forum” written in curving, blue neon letters — beckons like a spaceship. Upon seeing it, I feel the thrill of catching a movie in an actual cinema: It’s my first visit to Film Forum since it reopened in 2021 following a nearly 13-month closure on account of Covid-19.In the lobby, there’s anticipatory chatter: film students talking into their phones and older Greenwich Village and SoHo locals (like me) discussing the state of the world. The reserved seating system — a measure instigated during the pandemic — ended this month, and the first-come-first-served rule resumed, bringing back with it the kvetching about grabbing a preferred seat. The theater director, filmmaker and painter André Gregory, a devout Film Forum fan, once left sweaters on a pair of chairs while he and his wife, the filmmaker Cindy Kleine, went for chocolate egg creams in the lobby and returned to find people sitting in them. “The woman said, ‘I don’t care. We’re not moving,’ and [her companion] threw my sweater in my direction,” Gregory says with a laugh. In 2018, the theater underwent a renovation — prompted in part by a common refrain, “Love the movies, hate the seats,” from guests in an audience survey two years earlier — and upgraded its chairs, which are now softer, wider and infinitely more comfortable.The rest of the interior is also welcoming, with big red columns, and walls hung with movie posters, film schedules and original art. At the lobby concession stand, there’s good espresso and great snacks, both the requisite popcorn and baked goods, including a particularly delicious orange-chocolate Bundt cake. The theater’s director, Karen Cooper, who has been in charge of Film Forum for 50 of its 52 years, may be fiercely political in her choice of films — tonight’s movie was her discovery — but she’s all doting mother when it comes to the sweets, most of which come from Betty Bakery in Brooklyn.The view from inside theater 1, which, since Film Forum’s 2018 renovation, features wider seats.Blaine DavisA corkboard display case in the lobby shows current and future screenings and events.Blaine DavisThe story of movies as art, especially in Manhattan is, in part, a tale of the rise and fall of independent cinemas. When I was a child, there was the Art on 8th Street, the 8th Street Playhouse and the Bleecker Street Cinema, all within blocks of one another. By the end of the 1990s, though, these had all shut down. But Film Forum, which opened in 1970, has always been special and thrives to this day, playing as many as 400 or 500 films every year (a fourth screen was also added in the renovation).It has spawned and nurtured a real community of cinephiles, who come to laugh, cry and argue. Sometimes, the audience feels like a part of the show — I once heard a fight break out in Russian in the back row. And before a screening of “Amazing Grace,” the 2018 concert documentary of Aretha Franklin’s 1972 gospel performances in a Los Angeles church, I witnessed a lobby packed with middle-aged women of all races singing “Respect,” as if they were teenagers about to enter a rock concert.For many, Film Forum is also a place to get an education. Peter Nelson, a cinematographer and director, most recently of the acclaimed honeybee documentary “The Pollinators” (2019), says, “In the early ’80s, when I was at N.Y.U. film school, their incredibly diverse program of indies, foreign movies and classics provided access to films that were often not shown anywhere else in town.” Nelson adds, “From time to time, I would do a ‘cinema binge,’ where I would finish watching a film, leave the theater and line up for a different one, often with a delicious brownie to hold me over.” Gina Duncan, the president-elect of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is also a fan. “Anyone who wants to run their own cinema imagines a place like Film Forum: a dedicated audience, good concessions and great programming,” she says. “It’s unpretentious, and I think that’s got a lot to do with Karen Cooper.”Karen Cooper, Film Forum’s longtime director, stands in a theater and against one of the space’s instantly recognizable red columns.Blaine DavisCooper was a newly minted Smith College graduate when she arrived back in her native New York City in 1970 and started looking for a job in the arts. In 1972, she became director of the nascent Film Forum, then located in a small loft space on West 88th Street with 50 folding chairs. “My annual budget was about $19,000,” she says. “And I made the coffee.” She’s held the same title ever since. In 1975, Cooper moved Film Forum downtown to the Vandam Theater; in 1980, she built a two-screen cinema on Watts Street. In 1990, Film Forum moved once more, this time to its current location between Varick Street and Sixth Avenue. Today, Cooper’s budget is around six million.At 73, Cooper, who lives in the far West Village and walks to work every day, is vividly articulate and fast moving, a dynamo who oversees a staff of 50 (give or take), the cinema’s fund-raising (Film Forum is a nonprofit with a board of 24) and much of programming. It’s Cooper who, along with the programmer Mike Maggiore and the deputy director Sonya Chung, looks after the new indie films and documentaries, while repertory director Bruce Goldstein handles revivals with the associate repertory programmer Elspeth Carroll. Cooper attends at least a couple of international festivals each year, and she’s rubbed elbows with everyone in the business from Werner Herzog to Robert Redford, but never name drops. “No one really knows celebrities,” says Cooper. “I wouldn’t pretend otherwise.”She believes the best documentaries can help change the world. “I grew up in the 1960s, during the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement — all essentially about human rights — and they move me deeply,” she says of the nonfiction narratives.The view of theater 1 from inside the projection booth.Blaine DavisCooper has brought in films like Spike Lee’s “4 Little Girls” (1997), about the children killed in the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., church, and, in March, Christine Turner’s “Lynching Postcards: ‘Token of a Great Day’” (2021), a documentary short about 20th-century postcards depicting scenes of murdered Black Americans and bloodthirsty white onlookers — once souvenirs — and the way Black activists repurposed them to combat the horrors of lynching.Sergei Loznitsa’s “Babi Yar. Context,” the devastating 2021 documentary on the 1941 Nazi massacre of tens of thousands of Jews over two days at the Babi Yar ravine on the edge of Kyiv in Ukraine, is slotted for an April 1 showing, but was programmed months before the current Russian invasion. No doubt, Gregory, who was born in France and fled Europe with his Russian Jewish parents just before the Nazi invasion, will catch it. “I have a similar interest in films about fascism,” he says. Cooper confirms this: “André has seen every one of my Nazi movies,” she says, “and that’s saying a lot.”10 Movies to Watch This Oscar SeasonCard 1 of 10“Belfast.” More

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      Marina Goldovskaya, 80, Dies; Filmmaker Documented Russian Life

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      In about 30 documentaries she looked at the people and history of her homeland, some of it brutally dark.Marina Goldovskaya, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker who exposed the harsh underbelly of the Soviet Union’s labor camps and later chronicled the heady days that followed the state’s collapse — days that promised democracy but bordered on anarchy — died on March 20 in Jurmala, Latvia. She was 80.Her death was confirmed by her son, Sergei Livnev, who said she died at his home after a long illness.Ms. Goldovskaya, who often operated as a one-woman band, made some 30 documentaries — as writer, director, cinematographer and producer — and was a film professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, for two decades. Her wide-ranging films include a portrait of a Russian circus aerialist (“Raisa Nemchinskaya: Circus Actress,” 1970); a chronicle of six weeks in the life of a television journalist during the Soviet thaw known as perestroika (“A Taste of Freedom,” 1991); and the story of a Russian prince who returns to live in his family’s former estate, now in ruins (“The Prince Is Back,” 2000).In a review of “Solovki Power,” her 1988 film about a Soviet labor camp in northern Russia, Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the work “first-rate film journalism” and “a remarkable documentary about the prison camp said to have been the prototype for all of the gulags that came after.”With a style that calls to mind the films of Ken Burns, “Solovki Power” juxtaposes the cold, white beauty of the gulag’s remote White Sea location with the memories of eight survivors and an official 1928 propaganda film that touted the camp’s clean linens and enlightened teachings. Theologians, historians, poets, mathematicians and economists were among those who were sent to the camp, which operated from 1923 to 1939.In the film, an economist recalls the night she had to wake up her children, ages 4 and 6, to tell them that she was going “away to work.” Her son told her that his papa had already gone away. If they took her, “Who will stay with us?” he asked.And then there was the night, recalled by an academician, when 300 shots were fired in a botched execution — the executioners were too drunk to aim properly — leaving bodies squirming in a dirt pit the next morning.Ms. Goldovskaya began making “Solovki Power” in 1986, when it still could be dangerous to examine the dark side of the Soviet past, since her film would expose the camps as an integral part of the Soviet system, not as an aberration created during the Stalin era.Ms. Goldovskaya in 1990 shooting “Taste of Freedom,” a documentary about six weeks in the life of a television journalist during perestroika.When she told her mother what she was planning to do, “she started crying,” Ms. Goldovskaya recalled in a 1998 interview. “‘You are committing suicide,’ she said. ‘Don’t you remember what happened to your father?’”In 1938, her father, then a deputy minister of film, had been overseeing construction of the Kremlin’s movie theater when a lamp exploded. Stalin believed it was an assassination attempt and sentenced him to five months in prison.Speaking from Latvia, her son, Mr. Livnev, who is also a film director and producer, said: “The film really became very important not just as a film, but as an event in the life of a country. For many, many people it opened up so many unknowns, about how terrible our past was.”Another Goldovskaya film, “A Bitter Taste of Freedom” (2011), was about her friend Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist and fierce critic of Vladimir V. Putin who was shot at point blank range in her Moscow apartment block in 2006. The film included diaristic footage that the filmmaker took in Ms. Politkovskaya’s home over many years.There is “a scene in the kitchen with Anna and her husband, where you can almost smell the food and the coffee, and they’re talking about how they’re afraid,” said Maja Manojlovic, who worked with Ms. Goldovskaya as a teaching assistant and now teaches at U.C.L.A. “Boy, did Marina capture the energy of this fear, the fear of repercussions for her criticism of Putin.”Marina Evseevna Goldovskaya was born on July 15, 1941, in Moscow. Her father, Evsey Michailovich Goldovksy, was a film engineer who helped found, and taught at, VGIK, the All-Union State Institute of Film. Her mother, Nina Veniaminovna Mintz, studied actors’ interpretations of Shakespeare and helped develop and curate theater museums.The family lived in an apartment building built by Stalin in the 1930s to house filmmakers “so that he could keep an eye on them,” Ms. Goldovskaya said in a 2001 interview. She attended VGIK, one of only a few women to study cinematography there. After graduating in 1963, she began working for state television. She became a member of the Communist Party in 1967 and remained one for 20 years.Otherwise, “I would not have gotten ahead in television,” she wrote in her 2006 autobiography, “Woman With a Movie Camera: My Life as a Russian Filmmaker.” “In an ideological organization like television, a camera operator who was not a Party member could never be promoted.”She made close to a dozen films for state television before leaving her job to make “Solovki Power.”“I grew up in a house filled with filmmakers and cinematographers,” she said in the 1998 interview. “Many cameramen died during the war; it was so romantic to die for your country. There were so few women in the profession. My father told me that if I went into it, I would never have a family, that I would be unhappy all my life. But I was young, it was romantic, and I loved to push the button.”In addition to her son, Ms. Goldovskaya is survived by two stepdaughters, Jill Smolin and Beth Herzfeld; two grandsons; and three step-grandchildren. Her first marriage, to David Livnev, a theater director, ended in divorce, as did her second, to Alexander Lipkov, a film critic. Her third husband, Georg Herzfeld, died in 2012.Mr. Livnev recalled his mother “always with a camera.”“She was shooting all the time,” he said. “I can hardly remember her face without the camera in front of her.”In 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed, Ms. Goldovskaya was a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego, when she was introduced to Mr. Herzfeld, an Austrian engineer and businessman. Six days later, he proposed.Ms. Goldovskaya moved to Los Angeles in 1994 and began teaching at U.C.L.A., returning to Moscow in summers to work on her films. Guests to her classes, and then to her sunny, sprawling home nearby, often included noted documentary filmmakers like Albert Maysles, D.A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock. And she was closely engaged with her students.“She opened up her classes to anthropology students and students from other disciplines,” said Gyula Gazdag, a Hungarian-born filmmaker who was on the U.C.L.A. faculty and teamed up with Ms. Goldovskaya to make a documentary about Allen Ginsberg, “A Poet on the Lower East Side” (1997). “She felt they would bring a new perspective to documentaries,” he added, in a phone interview. “She knew all her students by name, what their motivation for making a particular documentary was.”Ms. Goldovskaya in 2011. “She was shooting all the time,” her son said. “I can hardly remember her face without the camera in front of her.” via Getty ImagesMs. Goldovskaya’s film “Raisa Nemchinskaya: Circus Actress” featured an aerialist who “was in a way very similar to my mother,” Mr. Livnev said. The aerialist died of a heart attack as she was taking her bow after a performance.“She never used a rope for protection,” Mr. Livnev said. “My mom loved this woman, she was a role model, and all her life she lived like this. She would work, work, work all the time. Her dream was to die with the camera rolling, and she would never use this security rope in her life.” More

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      ‘Royalty Free: The Music of Kevin MacLeod’ Review: Into the Spotlight

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      A musician who gives away most of his music may be heard everywhere, but few know who he is.Kevin MacLeod is arguably the most prolific composer you’ve never heard of — although it’s very likely you’ve heard his music. The Wisconsin-born musician, who has at times resided in New York, is a pioneer both of digital production and distribution. Essentially, he gives much of his music away. Working though the nonprofit organization Creative Commons, he makes his instrumental pieces available either for a one-time fee, or free. His works wind up on YouTube and TikTok videos, in video games, in big-budget studio films (like Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo”) and pornographic movies.Directed by Ryan Camarda, “Royalty Free: The Music of Kevin MacLeod,” conveys the scale of its subject’s achievement while offering an unnerving portrait of the man himself. He is in his late 40s, and he’s not quite what you would call amiable. He has a lot of definite ideas on a variety of topics, including morality in art, and his statements are sometimes startling. At one point he asserts that he wouldn’t care if his music found its way into a movie about “Nazis killing puppies.”The documentary is shot and edited like an infomercial, although it wanders from issue to issue to the extent that a viewer can’t be sure just what it’s pitching. And while it sometimes celebrates MacLeod, there are instances when the filmmaker seems to fret about how many instrumentalists are being put out of work by one-computer bands like MacLeod (something that’s been worrying musicians’ unions and others since even before the all-electronic band Kraftwerk made waves in the early 1970s).MacLeod then drops in a very personal detail, about an hour and 15 minutes in: “Right now, I treat a lot of my depression with alcohol, and it works.” Which throws an already wobbly movie into another orbit entirely.Royalty Free: The Music of Kevin MacLeodNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘32 Sounds,’ a Film Performed Live, Probes the Power of Listening

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      Sam Green’s documentary about the physics and emotions attached to sound comes to BAM with a live score performed by JD Samson and Michael O’Neill.Early in Sam Green’s relentlessly curious documentary “32 Sounds,” the filmmaker asks an employee of the British Library Sound Archive — one of the world’s largest collections of audio recordings — if she has a favorite sound. Choosing among the archive’s nearly 7 million options, she cues up a 1987 recording of the mating call of the Moho braccatus, a Hawaiian bird with dark plumage and bright shocks of yellow sprouting from its legs.The Moho braccatus was declared endangered in 1973, and by the early 1980s its population had dwindled to two, one male and one female. In 1982, the female was killed in a storm. And so this heartbreaking recording depicts the male’s determined mating call — a lilting, hauntingly hopeful whistle — ringing out five years after the death of the only bird who could possibly answer it.The Moho braccatus’s mating call is one of the most memorable of the 32 sounds Green alludes to in his freewheeling documentary’s title; there are also, among others, muffled gurgles from inside the womb (sound number one, naturally), the sound of a tree falling in the woods (playfully and expertly reconstructed by the Foley artist Joanna Fang), and even the sound of silence, as demonstrated by a particularly delightful montage of a wide variety of musicians performing “4’33”,” by John Cage.At the beginning of a showing of “32 Sounds” Friday evening at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Fisher theater, following celebrated runs at Sundance and SXSW, Green himself announced to the audience, “We’re going to make a documentary film about sound,” highlighting the transitory and participatory nature of what was about to take place. “32 Sounds” is the latest of what the Oscar-nominated Green calls his “live documentaries,” a hybrid form that combines conventions of a film screening, a theatrical performance and a live concert to create a unique and ephemeral experience. (His previous works include “The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller,” which featured the rock band Yo La Tengo performing an original score at screenings, and “A Thousand Thoughts,” which he made in collaboration with the writer Joe Bini and the Kronos Quartet.)At live showings of “32 Sounds,” Green himself provides in-person narration, while the musicians JD Samson and Michael O’Neill perform, in real time, Samson’s eclectic, largely electronic score. With the narrator and musicians seated in front of the movie screen, proudly displaying their processes, the effect is as though one has unscrewed the top of a traditional documentary to expose its busily whirring component parts.Samson demonstrating the wonders of a whoopee cushion.Maria Baranova-SuzukiEach audience member is also given a pair of headphones — Green and his crew travel with 500 of them — to better immerse themselves in the film’s soundscapes, and particularly for its experiments with binaural audio. Among the lively cast of characters Green meets in his wide-ranging meditation on sound and human memory is the Princeton physicist Edgar Choueiri, who experiments with recordings that mimic three-dimensional sound. He demonstrates this viscerally, shaking a matchbox at various points around a binaural microphone; wearing headphones, the listener can detect the clattering matches moving around in space. It’s heady and spine-tingling, like high-tech ASMR.While there’s certainly a specific charm to seeing “32 Sounds” live (particularly during a five-minute interactive dance break, when Green invites audience members to walk up to the stage and feel the quaking power of a pair of subwoofers as Samson acts as D.J.), the filmed narrative is engaging and richly visual enough that “32 Sounds” would still achieve many of its most spectacular effects at home, preferably through a pair of good headphones. (It played virtually at Sundance and is the first of Green’s live documentaries that, in addition to being performed live, will eventually be able to stream.)If there’s a star of “32 Sounds” (aside from the human ear), it’s the spirited Annea Lockwood, an 82-year-old experimental composer who has been making field recordings of rivers for more than 50 years. There’s a contagious wonder on her face as she invites Green, and the viewer, to listen to the loquacious chatter of organisms picked up by her underwater microphone. She prefers the term “listening with” rather than listening to — a non-hierarchical way of framing humans’ coexistence with the sonic environments all around them.Much like Cage’s “4’33”” or the composer Pauline Oliveros’s philosophy of “deep listening,” Green’s film aims to sharpen the viewer’s (er, listener’s) sense of hearing by redirecting awareness to the everyday environmental sounds one too often takes for granted. His 95-minute exploration prefers to leapfrog across several dozen scintillating surfaces, though, rather than approaching the type of depth or stillness Lockwood seeks with her river recordings. The formal structure of “32 Sounds” is a nod to François Girard’s 1993 experimental biopic “Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould,” and its chattily inquisitive tone is occasionally reminiscent of an audiovisual episode of “This American Life.”What gives the film a lingering gravitas, though, is how often Green’s sonic journeys lead him back to contemplating grief and loss. One man’s trash is another man’s aural treasure, as Green finds with the answering machine tapes he’s saved to preserve the voices of deceased loved ones. Lockwood admits that part of the reason she “listens with” the chirping creatures in her backyard each evening is that she finds the experience of listening to music too emotionally intense since her longtime partner, the composer Ruth Anderson, passed away several years ago.In the earliest days of recorded sound, Green points out that the phonograph — the first technological development to allow deceased people’s voices to have an afterlife — was sometimes advertised as a means of “stopping death.” His film serves as a poignant reminder that, for all the incredible technical advancements of the past century or even the past decade, that particular goal still remains elusive. But whether through the personal preservation of sonic mementos like wax cylinders, voice mail messages or any number of yet-to-be-invented formats, that impossible impulse to press pause on mortality is likely to echo, like the Moho braccatus’s persistent call, well into the distant future. More

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      Warhol-mania: Why the Famed Pop Artist Is Everywhere Again

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      Andy Warhol is currently the subject of a Netflix documentary series, an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and multiple theatrical works.Andy Warhol left behind a lot of self portraits.There was the black-and-white shot from a photo booth strip, from 1963, in which he wore dark black shades and a cool expression. In 1981, he took a Polaroid of himself in drag, with a platinum blond bob and bold red lips. Five years later, he screen-printed his face, with bright red acrylic paint, onto a black background. These and other images of the Pop Art master rank among his best-known works.But one of his most telling self portraits wasn’t a portrait at all, in a conventional sense. Between 1976 and 1987, the artist regularly dictated his thoughts, fears, feelings and opinions — about art, himself and his world — over the phone to his friend and collaborator Pat Hackett. In 1989, two years after his death, Hackett published “The Andy Warhol Diaries,” a transcribed, edited and condensed version of their phone calls.And now, more than three decades later, “The Andy Warhol Diaries” has come to Netflix as a bittersweet documentary series directed by Andrew Rossi. In a video interview, the director pointed out that Warhol had intended for the book to be published after he died.“It does seem like there’s some message which maybe he himself didn’t even understand,” Rossi said. “There’s an open invitation to interpret it as there is with any of his artwork — because I do view the diaries as another self portrait in his oeuvre.”Warhol’s cultural prominence has hardly diminished in the decades since his death, in 1987. His fascination with branding and celebrity, as well as the famous dictum often attributed to him — “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” — are if anything even more relevant in the age of social media and reality TV.“There’s a reason why ‘Warholian’ remains a description,” Rossi said. “He’s one of the few artists who has transcended his persona and become a part of the language and the cultural fabric.”But if Warhol seems particularly ubiquitous right now, that’s because he is — onscreen, onstage, in museums and in the streets. Earlier this month, Ryan Raftery returned to Joe’s Pub with the biting celebrity bio-musical “The Trial of Andy Warhol.” Anthony McCarten’s new play in London, “The Collaboration” — which centers on the relationship between Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat — is already being adapted for the big screen. The Brooklyn Museum exhibition “Andy Warhol: Revelation” investigates his Catholic upbringing. And starting Friday, Bated Breath Theater Company will bring the theatrical walking tour production “Chasing Andy Warhol” to the streets of the East Village.“The Andy Warhol Diaries” delves into Warhol’s relationship with Jon Gould, a Paramount executive.Andy Warhol Foundation, via NetflixTogether, the works create a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human beneath the white wig. Even as he created an indelible, internationally famous identity, this child of Carpatho Rusyn immigrants, Ondrej and Julia Warhola, grappled with his faith (Byzantine Catholic) and his sexual orientation (gay, but never quite as out as many of his contemporaries) — areas that both “The Andy Warhol Diaries” and “Andy Warhol: Revelation” explore in particular.A significant portion of the Netflix series examines Warhol’s romantic relationships. It delves into Warhol’s struggles to show his love for his first long-term partner, an interior designer named Jed Johnson. Later comes the preppy Paramount executive Jon Gould, whom Warhol showered with affection but who eventually died of AIDS.The Enduring Legacy of Andy WarholThe artist’s cultural prominence has hardly diminished in the decades since his death in 1987.Warhol-mania: If Andy Warhol seems particularly ubiquitous right now, that’s because he is: onscreen, in museums and in the streets.A Play: In “The Collaboration,” Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope give memorable performances as Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.A Book: “Warhol” by Blake Gopnik, the first true biography of the artist, reveals a narrative that gets more complex the more closely you look.A Musical: “Andy,” Gus Van Sant’s Warhol-inspired stage debut, may be the movie director’s oddest tribute to date.An Exhibition: “Andy Warhol: Revelation” at the Brooklyn Museum shows how Catholicism seeped into the Pop master’s work.Jessica Beck, a curator at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, was interviewed in the documentary series. Rossi found her through her work on the 2018 Whitney Museum exhibition “Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again,” for which she wrote an essay titled “Warhol’s Confession: Love, Faith and AIDS.”“There are these moments when he’s doubting himself, when he is questioning what it is to be successful, what it is to be getting older, what it is to be in love,” she said. “That’s one of the strengths of what the series reveals, is that there’s a human that’s behind this mythical story.”Beck pointed to pieces of Warhol’s “Last Supper” series, some of which are currently on view in “Andy Warhol: Revelation.” She referenced one painting in particular, “The Last Supper (Be a Somebody With a Body),” which fuses an image of Jesus Christ with that of a bodybuilder, a symbol of health and masculinity. Beck said the work reflects Warhol’s reactions to the AIDS epidemic.“When you have these two things juxtaposed, you have this real expression of ideas around mourning and suffering, but also forgiveness,” she said.“Andy Warhol: Revelation,” at the Brooklyn Museum, pays special attention to the artist’s faith.Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /
      Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Photograph by Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum“Andy Warhol: Revelation,” which opened in November and runs until June 19, is broken into seven sections that move visitors from the artist’s immigrant upbringing and the roots of his religion through the different phases of his life and career, with a particular focus on the tension between his faith and his queer identity.“This is beyond soup cans and Marilyn,” said José Carlos Diaz, the chief curator of the Andy Warhol Museum, referring to a few of Warhol’s Pop Art hits. Diaz first put on “Revelation” at the Warhol museum before bringing it to Brooklyn.Carmen Hermo, an associate curator at the Brooklyn Museum, organized the New York presentation of “Revelation.” Both she and Diaz are the children of immigrants, like Warhol, and she speculated that this part of the artist’s background helped to account for his famed work ethic and his fierce drive to create the best version of himself.Diaz said, “For me, he lives the American dream,” adding that more nuanced, relatable perspectives on the artist were finally “surpassing this mythological Warhol with the big glasses, big wig.”Warhol is “one of the few artists who has transcended his persona and become a part of the language and the cultural fabric,” said Andrew Rossi, the director of “The Andy Warhol Diaries.”Andy Warhol Foundation, via NetflixAcross the East River, Mara Lieberman, the executive artistic director of Bated Breath Theater Company, is using her fair share of glasses and wigs. Beginning Friday, Lieberman will direct “Chasing Andy Warhol,” a theatrical tour through the East Village in which multiple actors play the artist simultaneously, alluding to his love for repeated images and various personas.One scene depicts something that happened on a trip Warhol took to Hawaii with the production designer Charles Lisanby, with whom he was in love at the time. A couple of days after arriving at the hotel, Lisanby brought another man back to the room, and Warhol exploded, hurt — an event that has been described in biographies of the artist.Warhol has said that he later realized the power of saying “so what” in response to painful life events, an insight he detailed in his book “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol.” It is, Lieberman said, “his greatest coping strategy.”This attitude was a key ingredient — along with his ideas about identity, technology, celebrity and more — in Warhol’s “highly stylized, constructed, brilliantly strategized brand,” Lieberman said.“Andy liked to take life and put a frame around it and say, ‘Look, that’s art,’” she said. “We go out in the streets of New York, and we put a frame around things and say, ‘Look, that’s art.’” More