Short Cuts: Kusama: Infinity, Die Hard, Jewish International Film Festival

KUSAMA: INFINITY ★★★
M, 80 minutes. Cinema Nova, opens 26 December

If there is a long queue in a major art gallery or museum chances are at the front of it is a work by Yayoi Kusama. At the age of 89, the Japanese contemporary artist, whose infinity rooms offer a personal sense of vastness and the individual's place in it, is considered one of the world's most popular artists in terms of sales prices for her work, attendance figures, and social media reproductions. Heather Lenz's documentary, which runs through the subject's eventful life at a chronological clip, is respectful of Kusama, using curators and experts to chart her career and never imposing too closely on what was a difficult dedication to her obsessive artistic practice. Escaping Japan and a fractured, straitlaced family for New York in 1957, Kusama was both driven to advance her work and disadvantaged by a male fraternity that frowned on solo female exhibitions – both Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol borrowed heavily from her downtown breakthroughs. Depression, relocation, and art as salvation therapy ensured, and the work, abounding in dots and mirrors, offers a commentary sharper than the collective narration.

Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.

DIE HARD ★★★★
M, 85 minutes. IMAX Cinemas, Tuesday December 18, Sunday December 23, and Monday December 24

The question of whether, giving the Christmas Eve setting, Die Hard is actually a Christmas film is an amusing one, but whatever your opinion be grateful of the chance to see it a screen large enough to match its ambitions. Upon release John McTiernan's crackerjack action film was a revelation for the genre, marrying rakish dialogue to the geographically exact landscape of a corporate tower. Bruce Willis, still just that guy from Moonlighting, plays John McClane, a New York police detective whose attempt to win back his estranged wife, Holly (Bonnie Bedelia), is sidetracked when her Japanese employer's Los Angeles headquarters is taken over by terrorists. Veterans of Europe's turbulent 1970s underground – although for that to be accurate their ranks needed women – they're led by the delightfully sardonic Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman). The film's cause-and-effect plot is so cleanly assembled that you learn the dirty dozen's names – shout out to Alexander Godunov's Karl – and measure their individual fate as McClane wreaks havoc while trying to satisfy the arrogant authority figures outside.

JEWISH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
jiff.com.au. Classic Cinemas, until Sunday 3 February, 2019

This year's Jewish International Film Festival has been popular enough to earn an encore season at Elsternwick's Classic Cinemas, with classical music documentary Itzhak and the Sephardi comedy The Unorthodox joined in extended sessions by Who Will Write Our History (3 and a ½ stars, CTC, 96 minutes). A mixture of documentary interviews, docudrama scenes, and archival recreations, Robert Grossman's film is about the group of Jewish scholars and journalists whose act of resistance to Hitler's Germany within the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II was to create and maintain a secret archive that would preserve the truth for history even if they perished. "A wave of evil rolled over the whole city, as if in response to a nod from above," wrote historian Emanuel Ringelblum as the walls went up, and the film is a study of dedication in the face of demonisation, deprivation, and despair. Eventually the Nazi campaign turned to mass murder, so the campaign compiled evidence for future trials. The film is both deeply sombre and resolutely stirring – only three archivists survived, but the archive was unearthed for preservation and prosecutions in 1946.

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