Opening Night

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The Swedish dramatist August Strindberg once resolved that, "On a flimsy framework of reality, the imagination spins, weaving new patterns." John Cassavettes' 1977 film, Opening Night, stacks realities like figures in a Russian doll to ingeniously tell the story of an aging, method-acting thespian facing her mortality through a role that melds life and art. For his BAM debut, theatre's latest enfant terrible Ivo van Hove transfers the self-reflexive tale to the stage, erecting an all-in-one set (stage, backstage, and hotel room) and channeling live film and video. Famous for his raw reinterpretations, van Hove strips down art's artifice through the unpredictable maze that is the human psyche.

Robert Morris: Deflationary Objects

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Like Paris between the Wars, '60s New York was the epicenter of the art world — whether in theory, tectonic creativity, or the army of look-at-me artists on its banks. A Kansas City transplant, young, art-history-conscious Robert Morris arrived on the scene and began making sculptures that responded to the artful, Parisian Dadaist, Marcel Duchamp. Deflationary Objects is a rare exhibition of Morris' small-scale pieces, all made during the versatile artist's iconic and increasingly anti-formulaic period. Included are his Duchamp prompt-and-responses, such as the reflective, red-green structure Pharmacy, and unorthodox self-portraits, such as I-box, a sculpmetal-sheathed box with an I-lettered pink door that opens to Morris' nude photograph.

Amarcord

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Perhaps Federico Fellini’s most beloved film in an oeuvre full of oh-la-la, Amarcord returns fully restored and still full of more autobiographical tidbits than an about-the-maker section. But that’s the appeal: the maestro translates his fantastical and highly personal vision of seaside Rimini during Mussolini’s reign into nostalgia-embalmed vignettes with a troupe of eccentric townspeople. The multiple face-the-camera narrations foster a warm, joyful familiarity with Rimini’s memorable inhabitants—from lovelorn, dance-alone schoolboys to adored middle-aged dames—as well as its superstitious customs, like a ceremonial bonfire to burn winter’s witch-like effigy. Legendary Fellini composer Nino Rota fuses the romantic, melancholic and ribald elements with a wistful melody that’s perfect for winter-walk humming.

Problem Child: A Cinematic Display of Bad Behavior

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Hollywood studios have often lassoed the worst incarnations of children — as demons, delinquents, or the disturbed. This weekend, Lincoln Center highlights a few of cinema's most misunderstood younguns for its playful, "thanks, Satan" series, Problem Child. Poor-parent staples, such as The Omen (1976) or Wolf Rilla's Village of the Damned (1960), are programmed alongside lesser-seen shocks, like the orphan-turned-Nazi thriller, Tomorrow, the World! (1944), and The Children's Hour (1961), which centers around a student's accusation that her teachers (Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine) are — lord help them — lovers. The 11-film capstone, though, is an original 1973 print of William Friedkin's bejesus-eliciting classic The Exorcist.

Ann Lislegaard: Crystal World & The Left Hand of Darkness

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For parts two and three of her highly referential 3D video trilogy, artist Ann Lislegaard filters her consuming mind-and-matter explorations about time, space, and human cognition through the otherworldly science fiction of J.G. Ballard and Ursula K. Le Guin. Projected on two screens, the Ballard-burnished The Crystal World loops animation about a modernist, jungle-stationed glass hotel (à la Lina Bo Bardi's Glass House) that undergoes — ever so slowly — a crystalline metamorphosis. Meanwhile, the three-channel Le Guin composition, Left Hand of Darkness, imagines the author's icy planet where androgynous humanoids reside as Lislegaard stacks the novel's pages atop another and puts gyrating, rotoscopic imagery alongside drawings of male and female genitalia.

Jean Painlevé: Science Is Fiction

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Like discovering a sunken-ship's worth of time-locked loot, Jean Painlevé's surreal yet educational mid-century shorts are remarkable documents of the eccentric goings-on of underwater creatures. The curious precursor to Cousteau, Painlevé originally scored these magical, deep-sea explorations with jazz tracks by Duke Ellington or the electronic squiggles of French pioneer Pierre Henry. Tonight, however, the folks at Monkey Town screen the pseudo-scientist's surprisingly lascivious work with a wondrous Yo La Tengo soundtrack. Whether approximating the sea urchin's dreamy routine with an undulating synth or improvising the slippery movements of a lovesick octopus, the band knows that the sea's ephereal musicality lies in a rippling cymbal clash.

Battleship Potemkin: Matt Darriau and Paradox Trio

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During Soviet cinema's nascent years, Sergei Eisenstein pioneered a montage-as-manipulation theory that gave each of his colliding shots an excitable (and semiotic) heft. His editing prowess is particularly clear-cut in his film-school staple, Battleship Potemkin, which screens tonight with a new score by composer Matt Darriau and his Paradox Trio. To amplify Potemkin's militant credo and its frenetic, boomeranging imagery, Darriau's avant-garde ensemble delivers a lush, keyed-up mix of Balkan, klezmer, and cello-propelled sounds. Of course, the climax — whether it's supported by a dumbek backbeat or a strummed guitar — remains the tsarists stomping down the Odessa Steps.

Photographs From China: The Cultural Revolution to Present

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The belief that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" defined Mao & co.'s fist-first regime. Liu Heung Shing's Pulitzer-Prize-winning portfolio, on the other hand, argues that the zoom barrel of a camera carries similar weight. The photojournalist has spent three revelatory decades — beginning with the Chairman's death — freeze-framing China's remarkable transformations, which come to pass at an exponential, but hyper-exciting, rate. For tonight's discussion on Shing's photographs, esteemed sinology reporter/writer Orville Schell offers up his expertise as the back-and-forth bandies between historic contextualization and Barthesian dissections of the thousand-messages-in-a-snap images.

Kate Gilmore

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Whether they appear foolhardy or feminist, Kate Gilmore's masochistic video performances transfix with the same fear-fascination ratio as a ten-car pileup. For her new exhibition at the Smith-Stewart Gallery, Gilmore debuts a participatory, site-specific sculpture and video as well as three physically punishing shorts from the calendar year. Shot in one unrehearsed take, the color-schemed performances continue Gilmore's attempt to deconstruct the damsel-in-distress label for women by literally smashing barriers, whether it's the five layers of dry wall and plywood in front of a canary yellow (and heel-matching) wall or the tall plaster-block pile that acts as Gilmore's temporary pedestal before two muscleheads batter it down with twin mallets

Jubilee

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In Derek Jarman's punk-tattooed tour de force, Jubliee, Queen Elizabeth is transported 400 years beyond her epoch to spy a police-state England overrun with sex, violence, and — most atrocious — selling out. A stage-designer turned director, Jarman confronts England's neat, beauty-is-truth past with a bizarre future-vision that orbits around an antiestablishment girl gang. Besides several brutal scenes that are 200-proof visceral, the UK's first punk movie assaults the viewer with inverted gender roles, ravaged urban landscapes, and sloganeered nods to the country's cultural history, from Shakespeare to Siouxsie and the Banshees. Naturally, the supporting talent is legendary: Brian Eno delivers his first original score and counterculture idols like Adam Ant, Wayne County, and Toyah Willcox make attention-snatching appearances.

Cory Arcangel: Adult Contemporary

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Cory Arcangel rose to art-world fame with his hall-of-mirrors work, which cleverly (and cheekily) reappropriates media to highlight technology's protean relationship with humans. From an existential Super Mario to a subversive shooting game with Pope John Paul II and Warhol as pop-up targets, each of his pieces have been defined by their virtuosity. But in typical Arcangel fashion, the artist's latest act of technical abracadabra, Adult Contemporary, celebrates the "non-expert" use of technology — in short, the human error. Besides a suite of monoprints, the playful and theory-plastered exhibition features two computers in heated conversation, a "handmade hacked" game controller and console, a projection from a VHS tape, and a 16mm film full of dazzling imperfections.

Home Alone Inside My Head by Sam Amidon

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Tone-deaf to defeatist words like "can't," multi-talented singer-banjoist Sam Amidon tackles the whole thesaurus of folk art tonight. For the first time in NYC, Amidon combines tunes from his laurel-laden album All is Well — a release produced by Björk-certified Icelander Valgeir Sigurdsson and featuring Nico Muhly's airy orchestrations — with choice videos, interviews, field recordings, comics, and "pretend liturgical dance." Fiddler Bruce Greene, meanwhile, brings along old-time Appalachian music as his partner-in-time-signatures, Loy McWhirter, warbles lovely ballads from Britain and beyond. With Amidon's made-for-vinyl voice leading the way, monolithic MAD is transformed into an intimate, hushed refuge from the cold hustle-bustle of Columbus Circle.

Tom Stoppard on Chekhov

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One of Time's 100 Most Influential People in 2008, Sir Tom Stoppard builds up the hype for a banner '09 with tonight's conversation on Anton Chekhov, whose seminal turn-of-the-century play The Cherry Orchard receives a Stoppardian update this January. New Yorker editor David Remnick — with his all-things-Russian pedigree — fields Stoppard's discoveries from adapting Chekhov, while also lobbing his own astute insights on the doyen of Russian theatre. From Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to the screenplay for Terry Gilliam's dystopic Brazil, Stoppard's oeuvre is earmarked by dark wit and nimble wordplay, so expect a few verbal fireworks with your healthy dosage of Russian Lit 101.

Plantae Ekmanianae: The Extraordinary Life of Leonard Ekman

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With a résumé that boasts the abacus-busting credential of "2,000-plus plant species discovered and documented," Swedish botanist/explorer Erik Leonard Ekman was a Caribbean habitué who took to heart Blake's wondrous line "to see a world in a grain of sand." Besides gathering specimens that now go by their hard-to-pronounce Latinate labels, Ekman also tried his hand in cartography, charting Haitian mountains and accurately calculating the height of the Carribean's highest point, Pico Duarte. Tonight, Sweden's former ambassador to Cuba and artist Karin Oldfelt Hjertonsson delves into his sizable achievements with a lecture centered around her beautifully illustrated volume, Plantae Ekmanianae.

Bonnie and Clyde

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The counterculture reports that rang from Bonnie and Clyde's barrels appealed to disillusioned Americans during both the Great Depression and Vietnam-dominated '60s. In 1967, Arthur Penn immortalized the couple's get-rich-or-die-robbing exploits in his legendary and then-controversial film, Bonnie and Clyde — a classic that also provided a bullet-riddled carte blanche for future New Hollywood mavericks like Scorsese, De Palma, and Coppola. In true star turns, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway personify the hip, antiheroic pair — not technically lovers since Penn stirs the plot by presenting Clyde's sexuality through a Freudian prism. With surprising experimentation, Penn glamorizes their violent, on-the-lam lifestyle, one that culminates in a coup de grâce with folkloric designs.

NYC Restored

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Tonight's vintage New York-on-reels program affirms a timeless Whitman line: "it avails not, neither time or place — distance avails not." As it happens, borough-centric portions of Leaves of Grass inspired this evening's highlight, Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand's digitally restored 1921 short Manhatta. Cited as America's first avant-garde film, the documentary transports spectators back to the sepia era with 65 abstract, near-still shots of our beloved city, beginning with ferry commuters from Staten Island and ending with a beautiful Hudson River sunset. Lumière cameraman Alexandre Promio's verité footage from 1896 and Francis Thompson's Cubist, day-in-the-life short, N.Y., N.Y, offer additional looks at our metropolis throughout the fast-fading years

Idol Talk: New Political Video and Performance

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Politi-speak often comes across the airwaves as coded and peculiar as baseball's esoteric sign language, leaving the uninitiated with the hands-up question: what it all means. With less than a week until W. becomes the 43rd lame duck, electro-pop rabble-rouser Maxx Klaxon offers a unique interpretation of the historic election season. Klaxon closes out his subversive Authoritarian Idol series with a winner-announcing 45-minute mashup of syncopated beats and video that culls footage from reality TV, cable news, and old-school digital animation. The provocative ticket is rounded out by Luke DuBois' ten-minute précis of every State of the Union speech, From Gentlemen to Terror in 43 Easy Steps, and some incisive political shorts.

Life Is A Pitch

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The ability to sell anything, from material objects to immaterial ideas, has been an oft-mocked American feature, the equal of the Southern accent or the go-big-or-go-home mindset. Part two of BAM's Between the Lines series, Life Is a Pitch explores this U-S-A-tagged asset in practice around the globe, and particularly in the superpower-to-be, China. For starters, tonight's excerpt from Weijun Chen's documentary Please Vote for Me — a chronicle of a third-grade election for class monitor in Wuhan — illustrates how self-promotion has changed the once-elementary game in the Middle Kingdom. The reading portion, meanwhile, features John Brandon on slinging drugs in the South, Amy Leach on modern missionaries, and Kevin A. Gonzalez on the commodification of identities.

Manny Farber, 1917-2008

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Manny Farber was an inimitable cultural critic. Even when the termite-art advocate was defecating on your favorite film, what kept you agog was the way he delivered the teardown — with wit, conversation-starting insight, and the no-budge stance of a John Ford cowboy. While many contemporaries were wound more mechanical than clocks, Farber's reviews (for pubs like The Nation and Artforum) were defined by his inventive, if edit-evident, prose style, one that could wax lyrically on subjects as disparate as Preston Sturges' satire of American speed and Michael Snow's rhythmic, art-house constructions. Lincoln Center's awesome two-week run of Farber-endorsed flicks includes Alain Resnais' Muriel, Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout, and a new 35MM print of Howard Hawks' Scarface.