Cinema, Restored at BAM

Featuring an original score by Herbie Hancock, directed by actor Ivan Dixon (Nothing but a Man), and adapted from the 1969 novel by Sam Greenlee, Spook is “effectively Black militant agitprop,” wrote Screen Slate founding editor Jon Dieringer a few years ago, “an incendiary and uncompromising cry to organize and fight whose radicality remains undiminished.” Dan Freeman (Lawrence Cook) is a social worker who becomes the C.I.A.’s token Black hire. After he leaves the Agency and returns to Chicago, he utilizes his training to organize a team of underground guerrilla fighters.

Race and the Revolutionary Impulse in The Spook Who Sat by the Door, a collection of critical essays, was published in 2018, and Revolution in 35mm: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema from the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, 1960–1990, coedited by Andrew Nette and Samm Deighan, will feature an essay on the film by Michael A. Gonzalez. For the New Yorker’s Richard Brody, Spook is “no mere artifact of the times but an enduring experience. A supreme aspect of the art of movies is tone—the sensory climate of a movie,” and Dixon “begins with a tone bordering on sketch-like satire that soon crystallizes into a sharp edge of restrained precision.”

BAM’s Cinema, Restored program also features Dick Fontaine’s I Heard It Through the Grapevine (1982), which tracks James Baldwin’s journey through the U.S. in 1980. Moving from one landmark of the 1960s-era Civil Rights movement to the next, Baldwin catches up with friends and allies such as Amiri Baraka, Sterling Brown, and Chinua Achebe. Grapevine is “as much an essay as a documentary, with Baldwin a seemingly eager participant and coauthor of the work,” wrote Darren Hughes for Filmmaker last year. The film “gives lie to the comforting notion that suffering and sacrifice lead inevitably to justice and progress. It’s a harsh truth, precisely and artfully rendered.”

Chronologically, BAM’s series begins with Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), which “stands above all other films,” Paul Schrader has said, “because, quite simply, it has it all. If one movie can stand for all others, represent all that film can be, that film is The Rules of the Game.” Dave Kehr has called Shadow of a Doubt (1943), starring Joseph Cotten as a serial murderer, Alfred Hitchcock’s “first indisputable masterpiece.”

When critic Adrian Martin first saw Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), it struck him as something like “the shotgun marriage of a Hollywood epic with an avant-garde poem.” Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983) screened at BAM eleven years ago, and in the Village Voice, Alan Scherstuhl wrote that the film is “steeped in some of the stiffest ennui of Tarkovsky’s career, even as he conjures images of surpassing beauty.”

In Mahjong (1996), Edward Yang “portrays mid-1990s Taipei as an unfettered new frontier where people’s wayward desires and newly deep pockets are ripe for exploitation,” wrote Vikram Murthi in the Nation earlier this year. “If Mahjong resembles a messy crime comedy, that’s because it acutely portrays Taiwan as a messy, violent clash of languages and competing ideologies, all undergirded by the noxious shadow of global capitalism.”

Writing about Mahjong for Screen Slate, Annabelle Johnston is especially intrigued by “the tension between the public and private, the impossibility of individual relationships within networks of belonging that, while haphazard, are the backbone of film . . . Despite the outlandishness of the violence and exaggerated performances, this tenderness prevails.”