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    Jeremy O. Harris’s ‘Slave Play’ Documentary Is Fueled by Experimental Films

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    The playwright Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play.” wears its intellectual references on its sleeve.Jeremy O. Harris’s new documentary — titled “Slave Play. Not A Movie. A Play.” — is ostensibly focused on acting students rehearsing scenes from his provocative “Slave Play,” which was nominated in 2020 for 12 Tony Awards.That’s only the beginning.The documentary, which is streaming on Max, becomes an examination of Harris’s artistic influences and why he wants his play to be seen solely as a work of theater. Part of the strategy is calling back to hallmark experimental documentaries.The playwright Jeremy O. Harris, left, providing feedback to acting students who are rehearsing “Slave Play.”HBO“It’s really important to pay homage to these figures who are just now starting to really get the celebration they deserve, but also opened the door for me to do what I’m doing,” Harris said in an interview.Here are some of the references that informed “Slave Play. Not A Movie. A Play.”:‘Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One’“Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One” is a movie about making a movie about directing a screen test.Janus FilmsUnderstanding the premise of this making-of-the-making-of documentary requires some investment.On its first layer, “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One” (1968) is a screen test filmed in Central Park. On the next, it’s a movie about William Greaves directing the screen test. And then it’s a movie about making a movie about directing a screen test.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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      ‘Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros’ Review: A Beautiful Collaboration

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      For his 44th documentary, Frederick Wiseman journeys to the French countryside to examine the workings of a family-owned, Michelin-starred restaurant.Frederick Wiseman’s transporting documentary “Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros,” centers on a dynasty of French chefs who live and work in a pastoral region in central France named Ouches, some 65 miles west of Lyon. There, amid rolling green hills and under the canopy of a century-old oak, the Troisgros family has a celebrated restaurant whose beginnings date back to 1930. The current paterfamilias, Michel, who’s in his mid-60s, has been cooking his whole life, and while you could say he makes food, it feels more like an expression of love.Making food sounds too pedestrian for the meticulously prepared, strikingly plated dishes that come out of the kitchen at their restaurant, Le Bois Sans Feuilles (The Woods Without Leaves), and certainly this is cooking on a rarefied level. It has long been acclaimed, receiving its first Michelin star in 1956 and holding on to its third since 1968. (It’s gone through several iterations and name changes.) Michel’s father and uncle, Pierre and Jean, were widely considered to be nouvelle cuisine pioneers, emblematized by a famous salmon and sorrel dish they invented. The chef Daniel Boulud includes the Troisgros salmon recipe in several of his cookbooks.“Menus-Plaisirs” is Wiseman’s 44th documentary and the first that he’s made since “City Hall” (2020), which notionally focuses on the administration building for the city of Boston. (In between “City Hall” and “Menus-Plaisirs,” he made one of his rare forays into fiction, “A Couple,” about Sophia Tolstoy.) Wiseman’s great subject is institutions, though more rightly the tension between organizations — with their spaces, norms and rituals — and the people moving through them. The bluntly descriptive titles of his movies are an authorial signature (“Hospital,” “High School,” “Boxing Gym”) and suggestively and purposely generic; one of the profound satisfactions of his work is seeing how he turns the general into the specific.Wiseman directed, edited and served as one of the producers on “Menus-Plaisirs,” which runs a heroic four hours (about a half-hour shorter than “City Hall”!). It’s absorbing from start to finish. Much of it takes place inside the bright, nature-inspired Le Bois Sans Feuilles, which is part of a larger complex set in a mid-19th-century estate that the family restored a few years back and includes a boutique hotel overseen by Michel’s wife, Marie-Pierre. Wiseman also pops into another Troisgros restaurant, Le Central, in the neighboring city of Roanne, making a more leisurely visit to a third, the nearby La Colline du Colombier, which is in the countryside.Wiseman’s approach is analytical and dialectical, and only seemingly straightforward. As is customary with his movies, “Menus-Plaisirs” doesn’t have music, voice-over narration, onscreen descriptive text, chapter titles or any other standard hand-holding. Wiseman instead uses images of specific physical spaces — the movie opens on the Roanne railway station and then cuts to its bustling, sumptuously stocked farmer’s market — that immediately establish a strong sense of place. In other words, he grounds you in the world of the movie and then, face by face, shot by shot, scene by scene, steadily fills in its details.The movie is arranged in distinct sections that suggest the rhythms of running a restaurant. The inaugural segment (call it Prep) introduces Michel and his sons: César, who cooks alongside his father and some dozen others at Le Bois Sans Feuilles, and the younger Léo, the chef for La Colline du Colombier. The sons run into each other at the market, where they’re hunting and pecking among the perfectly arranged leafy greens, bouquets of beets and radishes, and astonishing clusters of oyster mushrooms. In this section, the sons also meet with Michel to discuss menu options, and then the movie shifts to Le Bois Sans Feuilles.It’s there in this restaurant’s spacious, quietly humming open kitchen that the movie begins to gather momentum as Wiseman moves about focusing on one and then another station: One chef expertly filets a large salmon while another trims and butchers some ribs. Elsewhere, Michel and a sommelier discuss some outrageously priced Burgundies, and a brigade of servers ready themselves for the fast-approaching service. “Menus-Plaisirs” has all the virtues of a Wiseman movie, but its focus on beautiful food that’s prepared and served with equal beauty makes it especially seductive, even if you’re not keen on everything on the menu. I now know, for instance, more than I ever cared to about cooking veal brains.Once the customers arrive (call this section Service), the rhythms of the kitchen appreciably accelerate. Anyone who’s ever watched great cooks in action (in life or on TV) knows how enjoyable, even hypnotic it can be watching people with superb craft and technique at work, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. Wiseman is sensitive to the sights and sounds of kitchens, including the tempos of chopping knives and the syncopated hiss and burble of pots on a hot stove. He also underscores the hard work on an individual level and when the chefs are in the flow together. These kitchens thrum with quiet intensity, not ego.As “Menus-Plaisirs” continues, its focus widens as the chefs meet with some of their providers — at a small cattle farm, a vineyard, a cheese cave — where the mutual respect is palpable and the talk is sincere and often turns to sustainability. Each of these interludes could be spun off into a separate documentary, but together they expand the prismatic portrait of a family for whom cooking is an aesthetic, a passion, an expression of love, an ethic. There’s individual genius in the Troisgros kitchens, no doubt, but also enormous collaborative effort, which makes the documentary a nice metaphor for filmmaking itself. “Everything is beautiful,” a visibly moved Michel says of his estate; the same holds true of this deeply pleasurable movie.Menus-Plaisirs — Les TroisgrosNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 4 hours. 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      Claire Simon Finds a New Subject: Herself

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      The French director Claire Simon was making a movie about a Paris hospital when she found out she had cancer. So she became a character in her own film.Midway through filming “Our Body,” a sprawling documentary about the gynecological ward of a Paris hospital, the movie’s director, Claire Simon, received some medical news of her own: She had breast cancer.Four weeks into the shoot, Simon had discovered a lump beneath her armpit. But rather than cease production, she decided to improvise and turn the camera on herself.“I had to film a lot of naked women,” Simon in a recent video interview. “Then I was naked, too, and I was just like them. This changed my point of view entirely; it helped me cope and be calm in the face of my own sickness.”Motivated by the desire to show what she called the body’s “hidden truth,” Simon is but one patient among dozens in her documentary’s celebration of the body, depicted in all its wondrous and terrible iterations. “Our Body” — which played in this year’s Berlin International Film Festival and is showing at Film Forum in New York from Aug. 4 — assembles intimate patient-doctor consultations and surgical procedures into something like a volume of short stories. The subjects include abortion, artificial insemination, birth, gender transitioning, menopause and, eventually, disease and death.The veteran French filmmaker, a prolific creator of documentaries and fictional narratives that blur the boundaries between those two modes, has made a career out of turning the experiences of ordinary people into epic tapestries of human life.Often, she begins with a place. A Paris train station provides the setting for two films: “Gare du Nord,” (2013) an ensemble drama about briefly intersecting lives, and “Human Geography (2013), a documentary composed of interviews with the station’s inhabitants.“If you dive into pockets of everyday life, the world becomes very large,” Simon said. In “Our Body,” she added, she was concerned by questions like, “How does our civilization treat the female body?,” and, “What is the relationship between the body and words?”“I had to film a lot of naked women,” Simon said. “Then I was naked, too, and I was just like them. Cinema Guild”Our Body” is set in the gynecological ward of a Paris hospital.Cinema GuildBy capturing long, uninterrupted scenes of patients speaking with their doctors, “Our Body,” underscores the alienating nature of medical jargon. Yet these observational scenes also create room for the kind of bracingly personal testimonies that have long characterized Simon’s work. See, for instance, her 2018 documentary “Young Solitude,” a series of frank discussions with suburban high schoolers; or “Mimi” (2003), a kind of hangout movie in which Simon’s gregarious friend Mimi relates her life story as she drifts through Nice, France, her hometown.Simon was also raised in southern France (though she was born in Britain) by a family of painters and writers. She studied Arabic and anthropology in Algeria before teaching herself how to edit and use a camera. In the 1980s, she began making narrative shorts and eventually received a scholarship to attend a prestigious documentary workshop led by Jean Rouch, known as the father of cinéma-vérité.It was around this time that Simon discovered some of her most crucial inspirations, like Raymond Depardon, Robert Kramer and Frederick Wiseman — “my great master,” she said. Wiseman’s influence is apparent in Simon’s fascination with public spaces and lengthy conversations. “The Competition” (2016), a study of the admissions process for La Fémis, France’s most prestigious film school, seems to take up his mantle — Simon herself has described the film as “Wisemanesque.”According to Abby Sun, the director of artists’ programs at the International Documentary Association, Simon’s work nevertheless represents a significant departure from Wiseman’s detached and unobtrusive style.Simon’s movies are “metatextual, and they exhibit a knowing, personal touch. They show her as part of the fabric of the place or situation she’s filming,” Sun said, citing as examples a series of films Simon had made about her daughter, the philosopher Manon Garcia.The relationship between Simon and her subjects helps determine the shape of the film. This connection is key to her form of auteurism.“There’s a clear sense that there’s something collaborative going on, that there’s been a dialogue between the filmmaker and the subject,” said Eric Hynes, a film curator at the Museum of the Moving Image.Simon in Los Angeles, in August. “I feel that I have many, many more films to make,” she said.Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times“Nowadays, we’re constantly asking, ‘Where’s the consent? How do we know that the subject feels comfortable with what’s being filmed?’,” he added. “Claire has been at the vanguard of what we consider a responsible way of making documentaries for 20 plus years now.”Simon said although she considered herself a sloppy camera operator, she refuses to give the job to anyone else. Looking through the viewfinder allowed her to connect more organically with what she’s filming, she said. “If I’m holding the camera, I’m able to improvise and change my mind and I don’t have to bother with justifying myself,” she said. “As a woman, it’s a huge relief.”Having successfully undergone cancer treatment, Simon isn’t just relieved, she’s energized. Toward the end of the interview in late July, Simon gleefully announced that it was her birthday that day. She had just turned 68. “I feel that I have many, many more films to make,” she said.“Mr. Wiseman is 93, and he’s made another beautiful one this year, like he does every year,” she added. “That means I’ve got a little time yet.” More

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      Three Great Documentaries to Stream

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      A look at standout nonfiction films, from classics to overlooked recent works, that will reward your time.The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we’ll choose three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.‘Hospital’ (1970)Stream it on Kanopy.A scene from the Frederick Wiseman documentary ”Hospital.”Zipporah Films, Inc.From his debut film, “Titicut Follies,” shot at the state prison for the criminally insane in Bridgewater, Mass., to last year’s “City Hall,” filmed in Boston, the great documentarian Frederick Wiseman has created a body of work — “the films,” he always calls them — that doubles as a library of institutions, primarily but not exclusively American. It’s striking to consider how consistent his unobtrusive style has remained through more than five decades, and how much of it was in place early in his career. His fourth feature, “Hospital,” filmed in 1969 at Metropolitan Hospital in New York, had a degree of access that privacy rules would likely make difficult today.It is also the best Wiseman in miniature, because hospitals touch on so many of the subjects he would return to: the treatment of juveniles. The welfare system. Poverty. Abuse. Wiseman wasn’t even done with medicine: Two decades later in “Near Death,” his longest film and a plausible candidate for his greatest, Wiseman spent time in an intensive care unit at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, watching patients at the ends of their lives and doctors arguing over difficult calls.If “Near Death” showcases humanity at its most fragile, “Hospital” finds mainly compassionate doctors dealing, by proxy, with the tumult and chaos of the city itself. A patient has arrived after a transfer that a doctor says put her life in jeopardy. A man shows up with a bloody neck wound that turns out to be all right, but came close to hitting a major blood vessel. In a scene striking for the period, a psychiatrist supports a patient in accepting his homosexuality, not trying to change it. A daughter tells her mother, who’s in critical condition, not to worry, a few minutes after Wiseman has shown a priest with unkempt hair hovering nearby.But in case “Hospital” sounds hopelessly grim, it also contains one of Wiseman’s funniest sequences. A hippie who has taken what he fears was bad mescaline tells anyone who will listen (including an unflappable physician) that he doesn’t want to die. After some ipecac and a round of vomiting that would be right at home in a Mel Brooks comedy, he’s fine.‘The Task’ (2017)Streaming for free off the artist’s website.A scene from the documentary “The Task.”Leigh LedareWhat is the task? It’s never quite clear in the conceptual artist Leigh Ledare’s riveting hybrid of documentary and psychology experiment, filmed over three days at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in May 2017. Set entirely in one room, the movie observes something known as a “group relations conference,” a gathering that brings strangers together to explore the dynamics that form. (To the uninitiated, it looks more like group therapy than a business meeting.) The participants come from a range of ages, races and socioeconomic backgrounds. Interspersed among them are a handful of “consultants” — psychologists indistinguishable from the regular group members by sight, although their role in steering and potentially dominating the discussion will be examined and re-examined before the film’s end.Exactly what the discussion is supposed to be about is up for debate: The closest the “task” gets to a definition is that the subjects are supposed to examine their behavior in the “here and now.” (Occasionally, even the participants profess to be confused about what they’re talking about; part of the fun is to watch reactions and facial language, and when people interrupt.) The conversations turn on ideas about vulnerability, victimhood, stereotyping and even whether people are playing power games by where they choose to sit. The presence of the cameras — and Ledare himself — complicates matters. The participants debate whether they would behave the same way if they weren’t conscious of being recorded. At times the chatter gets heated. When a man reveals himself as a Trump voter, a woman shuts him down and requests that politics stay off the table.“If this is as good as it gets, then how did we get to where we are as a species?” a man asks at one point, getting laughs. But the subject of “The Task” is deadly serious. It seems to capture nothing less than the process of people learning to trust one another — and not quite succeeding.‘Jawline’ (2019)Stream it on Hulu.Anyone concerned that social media is becoming a substitute for real life will find no solace in Liza Mandelup’s surreal and often funny documentary, which takes viewers inside the world of live-broadcasting influencers. (Those are different from Instagram influencers. Keep up!) With dreams of fame, Austyn Tester, a Bieber-coiffed teenager in Eastern Tennessee, holds regular video-chats in which he lip-syncs to songs and offers compliments to his fan base of adolescent girls, who seem elated at even the slightest hint of attention. Occasionally, these interactions happen in person, as when Austyn announces that he’ll host a meet-and-greet at a food court on a Thursday afternoon. One girl tells him she drove two hours for the occasion. He is a salve for his followers’ insecurities: an all-purpose friend, boyfriend, parent and mental-health counselor whom they don’t even need the luxury of knowing in real life. Nor, at 16, does he apparently need much life experience to substitute for those things.For his part, Austyn appears sincere about his desire to brighten people’s days — an earnestness that Mandelup juxtaposes against the grim environment around him, including a home overrun with cats. Austyn’s mother says his father had substance-abuse issues and beat them, but Austyn believes he’s good at faking happiness until he makes it. (When it looks like he won’t, his problems begin.)To show the milieu that Austyn hopes to join, Mandelup tags along in Los Angeles with Michael Weist, a manager for teenagers in Austyn’s line of work. He describes mentoring new influencers as a sort of time-bound gold rush. (This particular brand of celebrity tends to be evanescent.) He also barely looks older than his clients. But Michael doesn’t think Austyn’s “like” numbers are where they ought to be. “I wouldn’t touch him,” he says. More