Rogovoy Report For October 16, 2015

It’s film festival season in our region. A few weeks ago we enjoyed the Woodstock Film Festival. This weekend, cinephiles will flock to the northern Berkshire towns of Williamstown and North Adams for Wind-Up Fest, the rebooted version of the Williamstown Film Festival. Devoted to documentaries and nonfiction in other platforms, including writing, dance, and podcasts, the festival includes filmmaker Luke Meyer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Kolbert, who wrote the terrific book “The Sixth Extinction”, New Yorker cartoonist Bruce Eric Kaplan, award-winning cinematographer Kirsten Johnson, radio producer Scott Carrier of “This American Life”, dancers Monica Bill Barnes & Anna Bass, and more. Events take place throughout Williamstown and North Adams, at various locations on the Williams College campus, at MASS MoCA, at Images Cinema, at restaurants and other venues.

And it doesn’t end there for movie lovers. FilmColumbia brings prize-winning films, including recent work by masters of modern cinema, to Columbia County for seven days from Monday, October 19, through Sunday, October 25. FilmColumbia will screen narrative and documentary features, animated and live-action short films and contenders by regional filmmakers at venues in both Chatham and Hudson.

Fred Eaglesmith’s Traveling Steam Show rolls back into Club Helsinki Hudson on Saturday, at 9pm. A longtime favorite of Helsinki audiences, rootsy Canadian singer-songwriter Eaglesmith headlines this old-fashioned roadshow, which includes an opening set by singer-songwriter Tiffani “Tif”Ginn, who is also a member of Eaglesmith’s band. Acclaimed singer, songwriter and bandleader Eaglesmith is a genuine iconoclast and true original. He’s also hysterically funny, and a Fred Eaglesmith concert is nearly as much a stand-up comedy show as it is a musical performance.

Writer/performer Carl Hancock Rux and composer/musician Theo Bleckmann perform their two-man show, “The Exalted” - the story of the last days of German-Jewish art historian Carl Einstein, one of the first critics to affirm the importance of African sculpture, thus influencing the development of Cubism and the European avant-garde - at the Fisher Center at Bard College tonight and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Through music, video, text and installation, Rux and Bleckmann re-imagine the atrocities of occupation, the ‘discovery’ of African art by the West, and Einstein’s dream-like encounter with a metaphysical Diorama, as a metaphor for survival and self preservation.

The Hudson Valley Philharmonic’s 56th season kicks off with “This Land,” a program featuring new compositions by David Amram on the 75th anniversary of Woody Guthrie’s American anthem, “This Land is Your Land”; a video program of historic Dust Bowl images set to Samuel Barber’s haunting Adagio; and Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, lending a decidedly Russian tinge to the event, at the Bardavon in Poughkeepsie on Saturday at 8pm. Amram, who lives in the Hudson Valley, knew Guthrie, and often played his music along with Guthrie friends Pete Seeger and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, his son, Arlo Guthrie, and other musicians.