Museum and Film Feature: MICHAEL ALMEREYDA HERE AND NOW (Retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image)

A true American iconoclast, Michael Almereyda has been directing, writing, and producing unconventional, fiercely independent visions in a variety of genres and styles for more than three decades, whether working in documentary, fiction, or a combination of the two. From August  21  through September 20, Museum of the Moving Image will present  Michael Almereyda Here and Now, a recent career retrospective featuring four of the director’s most memorable  21st-century visions ’”  William Eggelston in the Real World, Experimenter, Marjorie Prime, and  Escapes  ’” and a collection of rarely shown shorts. The retrospective coincides with the release of his latest film,  Tesla, which stars Ethan Hawke and Kyle MacLachlan, on  August  21.

The prolific Almereyda has long challenged viewers with detailed, observant, and idiosyncratic portraits of the previously uncharted emotional depths of photographers, scientists, philosophers, and others who exist at a cross-point between tradition and the future, between the technological and the physical.

Tesla was the opening night film of the Queens Drive-In last week, but MoMI will also present an online members preview screening of  Tesla  and live online discussion with Almereyda at a later date (to be announced).  Tesla, an IFC Films release, will be available in select theaters and VOD beginning  August  21. For more information, visit  Tesla.

William Eggleston in the Real World

Dir. Michael Almereyda. 2005, 87 mins. With William Eggleston.

Tracing connections between the groundbreaking images of William Eggleston’”widely considered the father of modern color photography’”and the artist’s private life, Michael Almereyda’s light-touch portrait invites viewers into intimate glimpses of the photographer at work, on the road, and on his home turf of Memphis, Tennessee, tracking his interest in music, drawing, and video as well as photography.

“Fascinating. Speaks for itself, in roughly the same mysterious way an Eggleston photograph does: it casts more light than you expect, and deeper shadows.”
’” Terrence Rafferty,  The New York Times

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Experimenter

Dir. Michael Almereyda. 2015, 98 mins. With Peter Sarsgaard, Winona Ryder, Jim Gaffigan, John Leguizamo, Kellan Lutz, Taryn Manning, Anton Yelchin.

In an adventurous biopic almost as radical as its subject’”and foreshadowing a style seen in his new film Tesla ’” Michael Almereyda examines the life and work of social psychologist Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard). In the 1960s, as Adolf Eichmann’s trial is underway, we meet Milgram as he starts conducting his controversial obedience experiments at Yale University, hoping to uncover the truth about free will and acts of violence.

“Mr. Almereyda has a boundless gift for finding new ways to tell old stories, and  Experimenter, as befits its title, is less a straight biography than a diverting gloss on human behavior, historical memory and cinema itself.” ’” Manohla Dargis,  The New York Times

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Dir. Michael Almereyda. 2017, 99 mins.
With Lois Smith, Tim Robbins, Geena Davis, Jon Hamm.

A film that takes us to the edge of the “uncanny valley,”  Marjorie Prime  is set in a near future where holograms of the dead serve as memory repositories for the living. Lois Smith, who starred in Jordan Harrison’s Pulitzer Prize–nominated stage version, is Marjorie, an elderly woman with dementia kept company by a hologram’”a “Prime”’”of her recently deceased husband, Walter (Jon Hamm), which she feeds memories.

Marjorie Prime  was the second of three of Almereyda’s feature films (the others being  Experimenter  and  Tesla) to be recognized by the prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, in this case for the film’s “imaginative and nuanced depiction of the evolving relationship between humans and technology, and its moving dramatization of how intelligent machines can challenge our notions of identity, memory, and mortality.”

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Dir. Michael Almereyda. 2017, 89 mins. With Hampton Fancher.

Actor, flamenco dancer, and unlikely producer-screenwriter of the sci-fi classic  Blade Runner, Hampton Fancher has lived a life like no other. Michael Almereyda propels viewers down a wild path through mid-20th-century Hollywood, with Fancher recounting episodes from his remarkable life’”romantic misadventures with silver-screen stars, wayward acts of chivalry, jealousy, and friendship’”alongside a parallel world of film and TV footage of Fancher playing cowboys, killers, fops, cads, and the occasional hero.  Escapes  shows how one man’s personal journey can unexpectedly shape the future of an entire medium.

“A thoroughly charming, thoroughly engaging portrait of this great adventurer. Part of the pleasure of  Escapes  is how Mr. Almereyda, drawing deeply from the American pop archives… connects the original  Blade Runner  to Mr. Fancher’s life with its movie love, romanticism, beautiful women and mad, circuitous rides.”
’” Manohla Dargis,  The New York Times

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Fables, Poems, and Experiments: Recent Shorts

To the Unknown  (2017, 7 mins.)
Skinningrove  (2013, 15 mins.)
The Great Gatsby in Five Minutes  (2011, 11 mins.)
The Ogre’s Feathers  (2010, 20 mins.)
The North Wind’s Gift  (2018, 20 mins.)

Concurrent with his acclaimed feature film work, Michael Almereyda has remained prolific as a maker of shorts. The elasticity of the form has been apt for an artist with an interest in unconventional chemical combinations, genre provocations, and formal fluidity. This program of recent work is representative of the director’s formal and topical breadth.  To the Unknown  is a tribute to poet John Ashbery by way of Kenneth Koch and an ambulating cat;  Skinningrove  is an award-winning, entrancing work of nonfiction in which photographer Chris Killip recounts stories behind his own projected images;  The Great Gatsby in Five Minutes  is very nearly what the title suggests, somehow both lightly and rigorously transposing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic New York novel to contemporary Los Angeles; and  The Ogre’s Feathers  and  The North Wind’s Gift  are iterations of another visionary transposition, adapting Italo Calvino’s Italian folktales into contemporary American settings’”the former is an urban quest to infiltrate a menacing ogre’s inner sanctum in a New York high-rise, while the latter is a rustic-set fable in which a struggling family petitions the unrelenting, temperamental wind and is gifted with a magical appliance, with conditions.