Museum of Modern Art

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Lines Never Felt So Good: Crowds Herald New York’s Reopening

      by

      Museums broke attendance records, movie theaters sold out and jazz fans packed clubs on a Memorial Day weekend that felt far removed from the prior year’s pandemic traumas.The line outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art trailed out the door, down the rain-swept stairs, around the trees and past the fountain and the hot-dog stands on Fifth Avenue as visitors waited under dripping umbrellas. They were among more than 10,000 people who had the same idea for how to fill a rainy Sunday in New York City, turning the holiday weekend into the museum’s busiest since the start of the pandemic.In Greenwich Village, jazz fans lined up to get into Smalls, a dimly lit basement club with a low-ceiling where they could bop their heads and tap their feet to live music. All five limited capacity screenings of Fellini’s “8 ½” sold out on Monday at the Film Forum on Houston Street, and when the Comedy Cellar sold out five shows, it added a sixth.If the rainy, chilly Memorial Day weekend meant that barbecues and beach trips were called off, it revived another kind of New York rainy-day tradition: lining up to see art, hear music and catch films, in a way that felt liberating after more than a year of the pandemic. The rising number of vaccinated New Yorkers, coupled with the recent easing of many coronavirus restrictions, made for a dramatic and happy change from Memorial Day last year, when museums sat eerily empty, nightclubs were silenced, and faded, outdated posters slowly yellowed outside shuttered movie theaters.Most museums are still requiring patrons to be masked.Lila Barth for The New York TimesFor Piper Barron, 18, the return to the movies felt surprisingly normal.“It kind of just felt like the pandemic hadn’t happened,” she said.Standing under the marquee of Cobble Hill Cinemas in Brooklyn, Barron and three friends who had recently graduated high school waited to see “Cruella,” the new Emma Stone movie about the “One Hundred and One Dalmatians” villain. Before the pandemic, the group was in the habit of seeing movies together on Fridays after school, but that tradition was put on hold during the pandemic.“We haven’t done that in a long time — but here we are,” said Patrick Martin, 18. “It’s a milestone.”In recent weeks, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has relaxed many of the coronavirus restrictions that limit culture and entertainment, and Memorial Day weekend was one of the first opportunities for venues to try out the new rules, with a growing numbers of tourists and vaccinated New Yorkers looking forward to a summer of activity.The Met is drawing twice as many visitors as it did two months ago.Lila Barth for The New York TimesAt the Met, Saturday and Sunday each drew more than 10,000 visitors, a record for the museum during the pandemic, and roughly double what it was logging two months ago, before the state loosened capacity restrictions, said Kenneth Weine, a spokesman for the museum.Despite the near-constant rain, museum visitors and moviegoers agreed: this was much better than whatever they did over Memorial Day weekend last year. (“Nothing, just stayed home,” recalled Sharon Lebowitz, who visited the Met on Sunday with her brother.)And when the sun emerged on Monday, people did too, with the High Line in Chelsea drawing crowds that rivaled the old days.Of course, the pandemic is not yet over: an average of 383 cases per day are being reported in New York City, but that is a 47 percent decrease from the average two weeks ago. And there were physical reminders of the pandemic everywhere. At Cobble Hill Cinemas, there were temperature checks and a guarantee that each occupied seat would have four empty ones surrounding it. At the Met, a security staffer asked visitors waiting in line for the popular Alice Neel exhibition to stand further apart from each other.At the Met, visitors waiting in line to see its popular Alice Neel exhibition were asked by a security guard to stand further apart from each other.Lila Barth for The New York TimesAnd, everywhere, there were masks, even though Mr. Cuomo lifted the indoor mask mandate for vaccinated individuals in most circumstances earlier this month. Most museums in the city are maintaining mask rules for now, recognizing that not all visitors would be comfortable being surrounded by a sea of naked faces.“It’s certainly not all back to normal,” said Steven Ostrow, 70, who was examining Cypriot antiquities at the Met.“If it was, we wouldn’t be looking like Bazooka Joe,” he added, referring to a bubble gum-wrapper comic strip, which has a character whose turtleneck is pulled high up over his mouth, mask-like.And at the Museum of Modern Art, the gift shop was offering masks on sale for up to 35 percent off, perhaps a sign that the precaution could be on the way out.Smalls Jazz Club, in Greenwich Village, drew a crowd to hear Peter Bernstein on the guitar, Kyle Koehler on the organ, and Fukushi Tainaka on the drums, with the saxophonist Nick Hempton.Lila Barth for The New York TimesAlthough the state lifted explicit capacity limits for museums and other cultural venues, it still requires six feet of separation indoors, which means that many museums have set their own limits on how many tickets can be sold each hour. And some have retained the capacity limits of previous months, including the Museum of Jewish Heritage, which has capped visitors at 50 percent, and El Museo del Barrio, which remains at 33 percent.Venues that only allow vaccinated guests can dispense with social distancing requirements, which is proving a tempting option for venue owners eager to pack their small spaces. And there seems to be no shortage of vaccinated audience members: On Monday, the Comedy Cellar, which is selling tickets to vaccinated people and those with a negative coronavirus test taken within 24 hours, had to add an extra show because there was such high demand.No one was more pleased to see lines of visitors than the venue owners, who spent the past year eating through their savings, laying off staff and waiting anxiously for federal pandemic relief.Lila Barth for The New York TimesLila Barth for The New York TimesHaving Smalls back open was a relief to its owner, Spike Wilner. “It feels like some kind of Tolstoy novel: there’s the crash and the redemption and then the renewal,” he said.   Lila Barth for The New York TimesDuring the lockdown, Andrew Elgart, whose family owns Cobble Hill Cinemas, said he would sometimes watch movies alone in the theater with only his terrier for company (no popcorn, though — it was too much work to reboot the machine). Reopening to the public was nothing short of therapeutic, he said, especially because most people seemed grateful to simply be there.“These are the most polite and patient customers we’ve had in a long time,” he said.Reopening has been slower for music venues, which tend to book talent months in advance, and who say the economics of reopening with social distancing restrictions is impractical.Those capacity limits and social distancing requirements have kept most jazz clubs in the city closed for now, but Smalls, in the Village, is an exception. In fact, the club was so eager to reopen at any capacity level that it tried to briefly in February, positioning itself primarily as a bar and restaurant with incidental music, said the club’s owner, Spike Wilner. That decision resulted in a steep fine and ongoing red tape, he said.Still, for Wilner, there was no comparison between this year and last, when he was “in hiding” in a rented home in Pennsylvania with his wife and young daughter.“It feels like some kind of Tolstoy novel: there’s the crash and the redemption and then the renewal,” he said as he shepherded audience members into the jazz club. “Honestly, I feel positive for the first time. I’m just relieved to be working and making some money.” More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Her Man’: A Relic of a Bygone Hollywood, Now Restored

      by

      Now streaming, this mildly racy romance, from 1930, arrived before the censorious Production Code. What really sets the film apart is its incredible tracking shots.“Her Man,” a snappy bit of hokum inspired by the venerable crime-of-passion ballad “Frankie and Johnny,” was well received when it arrived in 1930. Decades later, the mildly racy romance, with lightly disguised hookers and pimps, would become a bone of contention between critics conversant with classic Hollywood.Periodically rediscovered, the movie is streaming in a crisp new digital restoration via the Museum of Modern Art’s Virtual Cinema. Although opinions vary on the American director Tay Garnett’s auteur status, his high-spirited lowlife drama is well worth a look.Garnett (1894-1977) broke into movies writing slapstick comedies for Mack Sennett and Hal Roach. “Her Man,” released four years before the censorious Production Code, is set in a roomy Havana “dance hall” named the Thalia, catering to (and robbing from) drunken American sailors. The tale is full of comic roughhouse. In his indispensable history “The American Cinema,” the critic Andrew Sarris characterized Garnett as a “rowdy vaudevillian” and “an artist with the kind of rough edges that cause the overcivilized French sensibility to swoon in sheer physical frustration.”Be that as it may, “Her Man” was a favorite of Henri Langlois, the founder of the Cinémathèque Française. John Ashbery evidently saw the movie in Paris and cites it in his poem in praise of Helen Twelvetrees, the fragile Brooklyn-born actress who plays the teenage “bar-girl” Frankie.Twelvetrees, who committed suicide in 1958, was best known for starring in lachrymose melodramas. She’s spunkier here, caught between her shiv-wielding “protector” Johnnie (Ricardo Cortez, né Jacob Krantz) and a Sir Galahad figure, the sweet-singing American sailor Dan (Phillips Holmes, described in Ashbery’s poem as “awkwardly handsome”). “You’re just a dame and a pretty regular little dame at that,” Dan tells her on a date that winds up at a mission on St. Patrick’s Day.As befits an early talkie, “Her Man” is intermittently stagy, most often when the Broadway diva Marjorie Rambeau, emphatically playing an aging hooker with alcohol issues and a maternal interest in Frankie, is on set. But it’s also enlivened by a number of spirited secondary players. Thelma Todd, a comic beauty in several Marx Brothers movies, appears in a black wig with spit curls as the other woman, Nelly. Franklin Pangborn, a specialist in high-strung roles, is surprisingly bellicose, repeatedly mixing it up with Danny’s sailor pals (James Gleason and Harry Sweet). Their idiotic ongoing struggle for possession of a bowler hat evokes Garnett’s work with Laurel and Hardy.There’s an abundance of running gags, but what really sets “Her Man” apart is its fluidity. Garnett orchestrates several extended dolly shots through Havana’s red-light district — the camera navigating crowds, horse carts and fistfights. The accompanying sound mix is no less swoon-worthy. The movie, which often seems like one long barroom brawl, ends with the destruction of the Thalia set. (Evidently, Garnett hired a number of college football players and former boxers as extras.)“Her Man” is a period piece in more ways than one. The cavalcade of drunken antics is a reminder that while the Production Code didn’t fully exist in 1930, Prohibition was still in effect.Her ManStreaming through June 10; moma.org. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Louis Valray Made Only 2 Movies. But Both Are Incredible.

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyLouis Valray Made Only 2 Movies. But Both Are Incredible.After “La Belle de Nuit” and “Escale,” the French director went on to become an engineer and died in obscurity. A virtual release gives these moody, sensual films new life.Jacques Dumesnil and Véra Korène in “La Belle de Nuit” (1934).Credit…Lobster FilmsMarch 10, 2021Updated 4:19 p.m. ETSomething old is sometimes new as with the rediscovery of French director Louis Valray (1896-1972), whose hitherto unknown films enrich the era of Jean Vigo, Jean Renoir, Sacha Guitry and Marcel Carné.Two of Valray’s features, “La Belle de Nuit” (1934) and “Escale” (1935), restored and subtitled by Lobster Films, are currently streaming for members via the Museum of Modern Art’s Virtual Cinema.Included last year in MoMA’s annual series, “To Save and Project,” the movies are surprisingly fresh period pieces — infusing the moody atmosphere of French “poetic realism” with a breath of plein-air cinema and a jaunty music-hall energy. Valray’s distinctive style is marked by off-center compositions and elliptical storytelling as well as a near-documentary obsession with the seamy side of Mediterranean ports like his hometown, Toulon. Both movies lavish attention on waterfront dives, roistering sailors and back-alley hôtels de passe.“La Belle de Nuit” (“The Beauty of the Night”) adapts a late work by the boulevard playwright Pierre Wolff and features Véra Korène, a star of the Comédie Française, in a juicy double role. Cleverly theatrical, the movie is a backstage tale of erotic revenge in which a cuckolded dramatist stage-manages his rival’s comeuppance. Life is a performance, heard as much as seen. “To encounter ‘La Belle de Nuit’ is to see a film stunningly ahead of its time,” Ben Kenigsberg wrote in The New York Times last year, comparing Valray’s use of sound to that of Orson Welles.Samson Fainsilber in “Escale.”Credit…Lobster FilmsLesser but more eccentric with its blunt shifts in tone and showy transitions, “Escale” (translated as “stopover”) details the unhappy love affair between an upright ship’s officer and a moll (Colette Darfeuil) associated with a waterfront tough (Samson Fainsilber). Among other things, the film includes a romantic idyll on a jungle isle whose animating spirit is the hero’s servant, played to the hilt by the Senegalese dancer Féral Benga.Many of Valray’s innovations are a function of his frugality. Clearly low-budget, “Escale” makes economical use of music and sound effects to power a scene and then cuts back, trading in close-ups, for the emotional climax. When the movie was released in the U.S. in 1942 as “Thirteen Days of Love,” The New York Times reviewer found it grotesquely, rather than boldly, anachronistic: “Perhaps there was some procrustean age when this languidly sentimental trash may have seemed important.” Perhaps that age is now.Unmentioned in the review is the movie’s most obviously retro element. Good-looking, athletic and professionally underdressed, Benga was the male equivalent of Josephine Baker with whom he sometimes partnered at the Folies-Bergère. Jean Cocteau cast him as an angel in “The Blood of a Poet”; Pavel Tchelitchew painted his portrait. Whether or not Benga is camping on his clichéd role, he turns the movie to his own exhibitionist purpose — even referring to his trademark “saber dance.”After the war, Benga opened a Left Bank club that featured Senegalese music, dance and poetry and, according to Boris Vian’s Manual of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, attracted a youthful, significantly African clientele. For his part, Valray made one more short film, became a radio announcer, then a chemical engineer and died in obscurity.La Belle de NuitEscaleMuseum of Modern Art Virtual Cinema, through March 18.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More