Showing 21 - 30 of 297 Performing Arts annotations

One Child Nation

Wang, Nanfu; Zhang, Jialing

Last Updated: Apr-10-2020
Annotated by:
Jiang, Joshua

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

Following the birth of her son, director Nanfu Wang’s foray into motherhood prompts her to consider her own upbringing in the shadow of China’s one-child policy. Starting from the experiences of her family and townspeople and extending to the policy’s international consequences, Wang documents the enormous cost of a social experiment that, when enacted in 1979, claimed to be absolutely essential for the economic salvation of the nation. Candid interviews with relatives, medical and governmental personnel, journalists, and activists are woven together with Wang’s personal musings on Chinese culture, civil liberties, and national memory. The film raises important bioethical questions, demonstrates a troubling intersection of medicine and the state, and confronts viewers with the realities of a policy that intruded into one of the most intimate aspects of a people’s humanity.

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Time Out of Mind

Moverman, Oren

Last Updated: Mar-06-2020
Annotated by:
Bruell , Lucy

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

A construction crew enters an abandoned apartment in NYC and finds an older man in a wool overcoat asleep in the bathtub.  He can’t tell them his name or how he got there, just that he’s waiting for his friend, Sheila, to come back to the apartment.  The building manager (Steve Buscemi) throws him out of the building and into a life on the street, drinking, sleeping wherever he can, and riding the trains.  His name, we later find out, is George (Richard Gere), and he is one of NYC’s homeless men.  George can’t seem to remember much about his past, only that his wife died of breast cancer, he lost his job, and he has a daughter (Jena Malone) who works at a nearby bar but wants nothing to do with him.  After nights trying to find a warm place to sleep, George ends up at the Bellevue Men’s Shelter where he is befriended by Dixon (Ben Vereen).  Dixon shows George the ropes—how to apply for assistance, where to get a copy of his birth certificate, where they can get a shower up in the Bronx.  But Dixon disappears, removed from the shelter ostensibly for being disruptive. George is left on his own.

We don’t know who Sheila is, or even whether she is real.  George sees a woman (Kyra Sedgwich) pushing a shopping cart by the river and calls out to her.  She’s not Sheila.  They share a couple of cans of beer and spend the night in a park near the river. “ You’ve got to get along to get along,” she tells him.  Your real friends will look out for you on the street.”  But in the morning she is gone- George wakes up to laughter from boys who are snapping photos of him under his blanket.  On his own again, in and out of shelters, George drops by the bar to see his daughter, hoping to overcome their estrangement. 




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BPM (Beats per Minute)

Campillo, Robin

Last Updated: Feb-20-2020
Annotated by:
Zander, Devon

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

BPM is a fictional, French film about ACT UP Paris in the 1990s.  Directed by Robin Campillo, himself a veteran of Paris’s ACT UP, the film details the realities of being an HIV/AIDS political action group during an era of governmental inaction and lack of recognition of those most impacted by HIV and AIDS.  Initially, BPM focuses on the collection of individuals who make up ACT UP Paris and how they organize themselves to protest and advocate for greater media attention, better sexual education, and more access to new pharmaceutical data, among a myriad of other causes.  The film eventually shifts its focus from ACT UP as a group to two of its members, a couple, one of whom, Sean, is struggling with AIDS and Nathan, his partner, who supports him together with the the rest of ACT UP. 

In addition to its presentation of HIV activism, BPM documents what it meant to be HIV positive in a world without highly active antiretroviral therapy and where those most affected were largely ignored or even viewed with disdain.  Historical references ground the film firmly in the 1990s, including allusions to France’s infected blood scandal when hemophiliacs were knowingly given infected blood products, discussions that led to the initial development of protease inhibitors, and ACT UP Paris’s 1993 protest on World AIDS Day when a large pink condom covered the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde.  Contrasting with these larger historical references are daily moments of living with HIV in this era. Members of ACT UP are shown taking AZT and DDI around the clock (including ensuring to pack water during a protest, in case of arrest, when they may need to take medication in jail), regularly attending the funerals of friends who died of AIDS, and enduring moments of homophobia from those outside of ACT UP.



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The Father

Zeller, Florian; Hampton, Christopher

Last Updated: Nov-19-2019
Annotated by:
Teagarden, J. Russell

Primary Category: Literature / Plays — Secondary Category: Performing Arts / Theater

Genre: Play

Summary:

This annotation is based on a live performance presented by the Manhattan Theater Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater  in New York City that ran between April and June of 2016. The play was nominated for a 2016 Tony Award for best play, and Frank Langella won the 2016 Tony Award for best performance by an actor in a leading role in a play. In supporting roles were Kathryn Erbe, Brian Avers, Charles Borland, Hannah Cabell, and Kathleen McNenny.
 
The Father is the story of an older man with Alzheimer’s disease (André) and his progression through first living on his own, then living with his daughter (Anne), and finally living in a nursing home. Or, is it? It’s hard to tell, and that is the intention of the playwright, Florian Zeller, who told The Guardian (2015), “The Father is about an old man lost in the labyrinth of his mind.” The objective of the play is to bring audience members into the actual dementia experience so that rather than witnessing André’s disorientation they feel his disorientation.  

The director, Doug Hughes, creates the audience experience through an interplay among set designs, lighting effects, repeated scene sequences, and time loops as contexts for various symptom manifestations like memory loss, paranoia, anger, and lasciviousness. All the scenes take place in one room that serves at different times as André’s flat, Anne’s flat, and a nursing home room. The furnishings of the room change based on the supposed setting, but the walls are exactly the same for all of them. In different scenes, André is not always sure where he is, and neither is the audience.  

Early in the play, André hears Anne tell him she’s relocating from Paris to London with her lover, but she is present to him in most of the scenes thereafter and until the end of the play when he’s told by a nurse that Anne had moved to London some time ago. Had she really left Paris and was never actually there in all those other scenes? He wonders and so does the audience. In other scenes, the way characters from the past and present enter and exit distorts time for André, and so while audience members know the linear trajectory of the disease course, they can’t be sure of where they are in that course during a given scene. With the last scene taking place in André’s nursing home room with the same walls seen in his flat and Anne’s flat, the audience can’t be faulted for wondering whether all that came before was just one of André’s hallucinations.  

The play does not keep audience members in a perpetual state of confusion and despondency. Farcical elements are peppered throughout that produce occasional laughs, such as when Anne contests André’s account of a previous conversation, he suggests it’s she who has the memory problem: “You’ve forgotten. Listen, Anne, I have a feeling you sometimes suffer from memory loss. You do, I’m telling you. It’s worrying me. Haven’t you noticed?”

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The Genius of Marian

Fitch, Anna; White, Banker

Last Updated: Sep-16-2019
Annotated by:
Teagarden, J. Russell

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

Pamela Steele White was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease at the age of sixty-one. A year later, in 2009, as her disease progression was evident, her son Banker, a documentary filmmaker, turned his camera on, and he kept it on until the autumn of 2012. His mother lived another four years.  

The film begins showing the cruelest of ironies at work. Pam looks up at the camera, introduces herself, and says she’s working on a project she calls, “The Genius of Marian.” Marian is her late mother, who was an accomplished painter. She had Alzheimer’s disease before she died in 2001. Pam’s purpose with her project was to keep her mother alive “by at least not forgetting who she was.” Alas, she confesses she hadn’t been working on the project because she had forgot about it until just recently. 

The film covers Pam’s plight over the next three years in various settings that show her mental and physical capabilities at the time. She answers questions family members and her doctor pose; we see her on family outings, and at moments when she’s captured alone lost in her thoughts, and lost in her house. We mostly see her struggle with memories and words, and with physical coordination (e.g., putting on a jacket). Some conversations reveal that Pam exhibited aggression and agitation, but we never see any of these episodes, only some nonviolent defiance on occasion. 

Family members are also a focus, mostly in the form of interviews. Pam’s husband of 40 years, Ed, is interviewed several times throughout the span of the film. As we see Pam’s capabilities diminish, we see Ed’s burden compound and his responses gather pathos. Pam’s only daughter and her younger son are interviewed and shown with their mother to a lesser degree. Some friends of many years are interviewed once or twice to round out the perspectives on Pam’s course over the time of the filming. 
 

The film is augmented with family movies capturing scenes of Pam and her brother with their parents, of Pam and Ed with their children, and of Pam and Ed with their children's children. These scenes are often spliced into the documentary footage to show similar outings at similar locations across the three generations.

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The Farewell

Wang, Lulu

Last Updated: Aug-19-2019
Annotated by:
Jiang, Joshua

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

In The Farewell, we follow Billi, a young Asian-American woman, as she takes an unplanned trip from New York to Changchun, China, to visit her grandmother—perhaps for the last time. Billi has just found out that her grandmother (Nai Nai) has lung cancer, stage IV. The doctor gives her three months to live. As troubling as such a diagnosis already is, the situation is further complicated by the family’s choice to lie about the truth of Nai Nai’s illness to her. Now, Billi’s family gathers to see Nai Nai under the pretense of a wedding, but the festivities can barely conceal a heartfelt and heart-wrenching struggle over familial responsibility, filial piety, and whether Nai Nai deserves to know.

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Survivors

Pratt, Arthur

Last Updated: Jul-19-2019
Annotated by:
Thomas, Shawn

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

For much of the western world, the Ebola crisis came and went without much fanfare. Perhaps we were jolted by the initial news stories, taken aback by the images from affected areas, and slightly unnerved by the travel advisories as we entered security lines at the airport. But for the most part, the Ebola outbreak was an abstract crisis affecting people on the other side of the world, multiple continents away. The closest that most Americans came to Ebola was to hear in the news about the four diagnosed cases in Texas and New York City. It is safe to say that most of the world remains unaware of the depths of this crisis in the West African hotspot countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone, New Guinea, and Nigeria.  

Arthur Pratt is a Sierra Leonian pastor and filmmaker, and he witnessed firsthand the invisible enemy that threatened to destroy his country, the communities, and the families that lived there. Despite the human cost that this disease extracted from the West African people, Pratt was inspired by how the people in Sierra Leone rose up to defend their country from a viral invasion that was attacking “the fabric of what it means to be African.” He felt it necessary to tell the world the story of Sierra Leone’s unsung heroes, and so he created a documentary titled Survivors, which focused on the work done by the ambulance drivers and nurses, interwoven with personal stories of children, mothers, fathers, and communities touched by the disease. Survivors gets up close and personal to the 21-month battle against Ebola in West Africa, and shows how the common people of Sierra Leone risked everything to come together and fight back against an existential threat.

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Waverly Gallery

Lonergan, Kenneth

Last Updated: May-02-2019
Annotated by:
Teagarden, J. Russell

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Theater — Secondary Category: Literature / Plays

Genre: Theater

Summary:

The play is set between 1989 and 1991, the last two years of the life of Gladys Green, an 85 year old woman who runs a small art gallery in New York's Greenwich Village. She lives on her own near the gallery, but she is watched over by an adoring grandson (Daniel) who lives in the same building, and by a doting daughter (Ellen) and son-in-law (Howard), who live uptown from her. Gladys can’t hear very well and she has diabetes, but otherwise she is doing well enough. 

From this point we watch Gladys gradually lose some of her mental capabilities, mostly memory. Our attention is directed to how the family responds and comes to grips with her deterioration. Aware of Gladys’ past before she opened her gallery as an activist lawyer with a frenetic lifestyle, Daniel lays out a strategy the family adopts: “she’s got to have something to do.” Their chief tactic is to keep Gladys in the gallery where she could mix with people, keying off what she said keeps her sane: “Everyone needs someone to talk to, otherwise you’d just go nutty. I love to talk to people.” 
 

This approach works for a while, and mainly through permitting a young artist (Don), who has never before sold a painting, to exhibit his work in the gallery. Don keeps Gladys company and talks to her. He thinks he notices her hearing problem worsening, but Howard tells him, "I’m afraid that’s more her memory than her hearing aid.” What speeds up her deterioration, however, is the gallery losing its lease when the owner of the space decides to turn it into a cafe. 
 

A path ensues that is familiar to many people who have been close to a person losing memory and other mental functions with age. The family desperately wants to keep Gladys as independent as possible, but they need more help as time passes. She can stay in her own apartment for awhile with visiting nurses and aides, but eventually she needs to move in with Ellen and Howard; they never liked the idea of putting her in a nursing home, and they never did. In an aside directed at the audience, Daniel describes what his mother did for Gladys thereafter: she “took care of her, dressed her and cleaned her up and fed her and watched her fall apart, day in and day out with nothing to stop it and no relief in sight.” It did end, though, two months later when Gladys died in Ellen’s home.

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The Florida Project

Baker, Sean

Last Updated: Apr-30-2019
Annotated by:
Jiang, Joshua

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

Free-spirited six-year-old Moonee and her young mother Halley live in a motel on the outskirts of Orlando, Florida. In contrast to the families vacationing at nearby Walt Disney World, Moonee occupies her summer days by helping her mother hawk bootlegged goods to unsuspecting tourists and making trouble with other motel-dwelling children. With a ragtag and often burnt-out cast of characters, The Florida Project portrays the challenges of American poverty, the frustrations of familial (ir)responsibility, and the limits of a child’s ability to make the best of broken circumstances.

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Eighth Grade

Burnham, Bo

Last Updated: Feb-26-2019
Annotated by:
Jiang, Joshua

Primary Category: Performing Arts / Film, TV, Video

Genre: Film

Summary:

A coming-of-age tale told in the parlance of Generation Z, Eighth Grade depicts the last week of Kayla Day’s middle school career. The path has not been easy: Kayla struggles with social anxiety and doesn’t have many friends. She’s voted “most quiet” by her class, but despite her outward reality, Kayla contends on her personal YouTube channel that, in fact, she is humorous and cool and talkative, if only her classmates took the time to get to know her. Her assertions are put to the test in the following week, during which Kayla goes to a pool party hosted by Kennedy Graves (voted “best eyes”), attempts to kindle a spark with her crush, and attends a high school shadowing program. These experiences challenge Kayla to embody the advice she so readily espouses on her YouTube channel, and though she isn’t miraculously transformed into the most popular girl at school in time for graduation, she learns something of being herself.  

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