20 THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY 17 &24, 2020
ILLUSTRATION BY MERIJN HOS
cross-country tour dedicated to music by the
French composer Éliane Radigue, and last
month he issued an illuminating retrospective
anthology on the Saltern label. Here, he pre-
sents the première of “Orpheus Variations,”
a new Alvin Lucier piece for solo cello, seven
woodwinds, and seven dancers. Lucier’s “Gla-
cier,” for unaccompanied cello, completes the
bill.—S.S. (Feb. 21-22 at 8.)
InsightALT Festival
Ailey Citigroup Theatre
American Lyric Theatre, which provides re-
sources, mentorship, and funding for the
composition of new operas, presents concert
readings of three works in progress. Liliya
Ugay’s “The Opposable Thumb” begins with
a military pilot crashing into a zoo after being
shot out of the sky. Evan Meier’s “Sherlock
Holmes and the Case of the Fallen Giant”
drops Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective
into the story of “Jack and the Beanstalk,”
and Theo Popov’s “The Halloween Tree”
adapts Ray Bradbury’s novel about a group
of trick-or-treating children on the adventure
of their lives.—O.Z. (Feb. 22 at 7 and Feb. 23
at 1 and 7.)
1
MOVIES
Hail Satan?
The question mark in the title is the crucial
idea of Penny Lane’s documentary, which
adopts a conventionally journalistic style
to present political conflicts of the day. She
films the activities of the Satanic Temple, an
organization that started small and expanded
nationwide, and which runs on an ironic
premise: far from promoting Devil worship,
the group is militantly nontheistic and works
to maintain the separation of church and
state—to oppose what one member, inter-
viewed here, calls “Christian supremacy.”
(The figure of Satan serves, another says, as
“a sociopolitical countermyth.”) The Temple
combats restrictions on abortion and resists
the placement of monuments of the Ten Com-
mandments on government property by as-
serting the right to place similarly massive
statues of the goat deity Baphomet, which it
commissions, alongside them. The group’s
members are masters of media who attract
attention while filing lawsuits; they also suf-
fer the growing pains of antiauthoritarians
who work within the system and confrontAt the age of eighty-three, the composer Philip Glass shows no sign of
slowing down; his calendar is chock-full of prominent bookings, including
a festival in Philadelphia and European tour dates with Iggy Pop. Still, a
shift could be under way if upcoming concerts by the Philip Glass Ensemble
offer any indication. The group’s engagement at Le Poisson Rouge is
devoted to “Music in Twelve Parts,” the watershed compendium that Glass
created between 1971 and 1974. Here, it’s spread across four sets in two
evenings, Feb. 16-17, and, for the first time ever, the band performs the
piece without Glass’s participation as a keyboardist. Elsewhere, new music
by Glass is featured in the director JoAnne Akalaitis’s adaptations of two
works by the Cuban-American playwright María Irene Fornés, which
get their New York première at Mabou Mines, running Feb. 21-March 7.
“Drowning,” a five-page play, is transformed into a pocket opera; “Mud” is
presented in a staged reading, with musical accompaniment.—Steve SmithINCONCERT
rebellion in their ranks.—Richard Brody (An-
thology Film Archives, Feb. 17, and streaming.)Hallelujah the Hills
In this antic, freewheeling comedy, from 1962,
the director Adolfas Mekas tells a story of
love, loss, and lunacy as filtered through
movie madness. After two losers, Jack (Peter
Beard) and Leo (Martin Greenbaum), spend
seven years courting the same woman, Vera
(each has his own version of her, played
by a different actress), she runs off with a
third man, and her jilted suitors head for the
wilderness in raucous despair, to live out a
survivalist fantasy that joins Mark Twain
and Ernest Hemingway to Charlie Chaplin,
W.C. Fields, and D. W. Griffith. Jack and
Leo see their romantic disasters (shown in
flashbacks) as Hollywood melodramas, their
rustic gunplay as war movies, their erotic
dreams as musical numbers. Beard and Green-
baum are the world’s loudest silent comics—
Beard, a sort of East Village Buster Keaton,
does dangerous stunts with a self-mocking
hullabaloo—and Mekas puts them through
shambling but surprisingly snap-timed rou-
tines that teem with cartoonish, bittersweet
whimsy. These cinematic idiots savants come
off as self-aware worshippers of clichés that
everyone else in their eccentric orbit lives out
blindly.—R.B. (Anthology Film Archives, Feb.
21, and streaming.)I Was at Home, But
The emotional repression and intellectual
stiffness that suffuse Angela Schanelec’s mel-
ancholy new drama are as much a matter of
style as of substance. Set mainly in a fric-
tionless workaday Berlin, the film is centered
on Astrid (Maren Eggert), a fortyish widow
and the mother to a troubled teen-age boy
named Phillip (Jakob Lassalle), who ran away
from home and is in danger of being kicked
out of school, and a girl of about eight, Flo
(Clara Möller). Astrid’s activities revolve
around her home life; her effort to buy a
used bike becomes a minor crisis, as does
a chance meeting with a filmmaker friend
(Dane Komljen). These encounters are filmed
in detached, tableau-like scenes—mainly
long, static takes, filled with painterly light,
which, rather than highlighting the power
of infinitesimal gestures, render them, in
isolation from society and inner life, even
smaller. A classroom production of “Hamlet”
and an outburst of domestic rage are equally
blank, arbitrary, and undeveloped. In Ger-
man.—R.B. (In limited release.)L’Innocente
Luchino Visconti’s last film, from 1976—an
adaptation of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s 1892
novel—brings literary flair to the story of a
marital disaster. A Roman aristocrat, Tullio
Hermil (Giancarlo Giannini), vainly pursues
the dark-eyed, willful temptress Teresa Raffo
(Jennifer O’Neill) and complains about his
romantic torments to the wife he neglects,
Giuliana (Laura Antonelli). When, in turn,
Giuliana seeks solace in the arms of a young
writer (Marc Porel), Tullio comes home to
her, his conjugal passion reignited—but the
revelation of her pregnancy sets off a chain
of seemingly inevitable agonies. Visconti
treats the script’s florid speeches as sensual