Those of us who get easily swept up in the tender, boundless empathy of Yi Yi may find it difficult to remember (or, due to the general lack of availability of Edward Yang’s other films, may not even realize) that much of this great Taiwanese director’s career sprang from his bitter sense of irony. While Yang’s final masterpiece suggested an artist beginning to make peace with an unjust world, his other major works were made in a spirit of indignant protest against a culture he felt was actively suppressing its own history and cheating its youth. Now that the World Cinema Foundation’s newly restored print of the 1991 epic A Brighter Summer Day is finally making its stateside debut as part of this year’s Film Comment Selects slate, Yang fans will get a stronger dose of the anger that only occasionally disrupted Yi Yi’s chastened world-weariness and Ozu-like tranquility. Where Yi Yi was dominated by brightly lit compositions contrasted with a handful of melancholy nighttime sequences, A Brighter Summer Day traps its audience in a permanently murky atmosphere—one that seems intended to precisely capture the political anxiety of its historical moment, but that also renders our relationship to time and space unstable. Read Andrew Chan’s review of A Brighter Summer Day.
FLAHERTY NYC
Monday, January 11, 7:30 pm
Anthology Film Archives
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For the January installment of Flaherty NYC, The Flaherty will present Original Child Bomb by Carey McKenzie, and Hiroshima-Nagasaki, August 1945, produced by Erik Barnouw, the first Board President of the Flaherty organization and programmer of the 1960, 1963, and 1982 Robert Flaherty Film Seminars. There will be a post-screening discussion with Ayana Osada, co-producer of Original Child Bomb, and Sumner Glimcher, Executive Producer of Hiroshima-Nagasaki, August 1945 and former Flaherty Trustee and Seminar programmer (1966, 1967). Moderated by Dan Streible, co-founder and organizer of the Orphan Film Symposium.
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Flaherty NYC: WITNESS
December 14 , 7:30pm, Anthology Film Archives
For the December installment of Flaherty NYC, The Flaherty will present and discuss recent advocacy videos produced by WITNESS and the grassroots human rights defenders it works with around the world. Since its founding in 1992, WITNESS has empowered human rights defenders to use video as a tool to shine a light on those most affected by human rights violations, and to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools of justice.
On the creation of WITNESS, co-founder and musician Peter Gabriel told Paste Magazine, “Time after time, good, written evidence has been ignored by the media or governments. When a WITNESS partner has produced a short and powerful video on the same issue, there is often immediate action.”
There will be a post-screening discussion with representatives from WITNESS: Sam Gregory (Program Director), Kelly Matheson (Program Coordinator for North America), and Violeta Krasnic (Program Coordinator for Europe and Central Asia).
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The always reliable FLAHERTY NYC series returns with their November installment tonight: Experiments in Animation.
Monday, November 9, 7:30 pm
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Continuing its mission to rescue lost classics from obscurity, Milestone Films follows up recently restored releases Killer of Sheep and The Exiles with Margot Benacerraf’s lyrical and commanding Araya, a film which, though it shared the International Critics Prize with Hiroshima mon amour at Cannes in 1959, has eluded wide distribution until now. Venezuelan filmmaker Benacerraf focuses on the populace of the titular setting, vast salt marshes located on a peninsula off her home country’s northeastern coast. Although Araya is a cinematic act of preservation—a document chronicling a place and timeworn practices just prior to a move toward modernization by the area’s salt-harvesting industry—the director is interested in expressively rendering the circadian rhythms of Araya’s salt workers and fisherman, and so her film becomes an ode to the people of the region.
Click here to read the rest of Kristi Mitsuda’s review of Araya.
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