New at Art Space 98

“Elemental Forces,” an exhibition of three-dimensional monochrome canvases and colorful oil paintings by Thomas Buhler, will open at Art Space 98 in East Hampton with a reception on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. and continue through Nov. 12.

Mr. Buhler’s oil paintings hint at figuration — a mummy in one instance, a yellow bike in another — but their expressive, intensely colored slashes of paint push them in the direction of abstraction. The mixed-media canvases, which present bold fragments of limbs in relief, suggest uncovered archeological remains or, in the artist’s words, “mummies of the past or modern hieroglyphs of the present.”

The artwork of the Swiss-born Montauk resident has been influenced by his passion for nature and his frequent travels to the Sonoran Desert in Baja California, Mexico.

Water, Water, Everywhere

“Water II,” a show of work by four photographers, will open at the Tulla Booth Gallery in Sag Harbor with a reception Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. and remain on view through Nov. 30.

Stephen Wilkes’s “Day to Night” series captures sites throughout the world, among them the crowded beaches of Coney Island and Santa Monica, Calif. Daniel Jones’s new photographs, the “Seaside Expressions” series, take a painterly approach to the medium. 

Herbert Friedman’s beach scenes are packed with bathers and their accouterments, including colorful umbrellas. Blair Seagram’s images of surfers are inspired in part by “their keen sense of timing catching a wave then riding across it.”

Syd Solomon in Chelsea

“Syd Solomon: Time and Tide,” a centenary exhibition of paintings by the influential Abstract Expressionist, will open tonight at 6 with a reception at the Berry Campbell Gallery in Chelsea. It will run through Nov. 11.

After serving as a camouflage painter during World War II, Solomon and his wife, Annie, settled in Sarasota, Fla., where the Ringling Museum of Art began to collect his paintings at the suggestion of Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art. The Solomons visited East Hampton for the first time in 1955 and within four years were dividing their time between Florida and the Hamptons. They were integral to the art communities of both locales.

A retrospective of Solomon’s work will open next fall at Guild Hall and travel to the Ringling. 

On Abstract Expressionism

Issues raised by the exhibition “Abstract Expressionism Behind the Iron Curtain,” which is on view at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs through Oct. 28, have inspired a panel discussion to be held at the Dedalus Foundation in Manhattan on Tuesday at 6:30 p.m.

The speakers are David Anfam, Joana Grevers, Charlotta Kotik, and Michael L. Krenn. Helen A. Harrison, the director of the Pollock-Krasner House, will moderate. Admission is free, but registration is required. A reception will follow the discussion.

The Met: Live in HD will bring its new season to Guild Hall on Saturday at 1 p.m. with Julie Taymor’s production of Mozart’s “Die Zauberflote (The Magic Flute).” James Levine, the Met’s music director emeritus, will conduct the full-length version of the magical fable, with Golda Schultz, Kathryn Lewek, Charles Castronovo, Markus Werba, and Christian Van Horn among the cast members. Tickets are $22, $20 for museum members, and $15 for students.

The simulcast will be preceded at noon by a breakfast reception and presentation by Victoria Bond, the composer, conductor, and opera scholar, who will read and musically illustrate passages from Mozart’s letters. Tickets for “Mozart in His Own Words” are $30, $28 for members.

On Saturday at 7 p.m., the New-York Historical Society’s classic film series will screen Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller “Notorious,” which stars Cary Grant as an American agent and Ingrid Bergman as the daughter of a Nazi spy. The evening will include remarks by Ron Simon, a media professor, and Dale Gregory of the historical society. Tickets are $12 and $10.

The next Guild Gathering, which brings together artists and the public for presentations and a reception, will take place next Thursday from 7 to 9 p.m. The free event will feature Yuka Silvera, a costume designer, Jeremy Dennis, a photographer, Kathryn Szoka, a photographer and co-owner of Canio’s Books, and Aurelio Torres, a visual artist.

The Salon Series at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill will feature Arianna Korting and Robin Giesbrecht in a recital of works for piano four hands and solo piano tomorrow evening at 6. “Piano four hands” refers to a duet played side by side on a single piano, as opposed to works composed for two pianos.

The program will begin with solo works, including a performance of the first 12 of Chopin’s 24 Preludes Op. 28 by Ms. Korting and Liszt’s “Dante Sonata” by Mr. Giesbrecht. The second half of the concert will feature works for piano four hands by Debussy, Brahms, and Schubert. Tickets are $25, $10 for members. 

Sotheby’s November sales of modern and contemporary art will be enlivened and enriched by the inclusion of a significant collection of works on paper owned by Dr. Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel and Carl Spielvogel, who have long had a house in Southampton.

The collectors have focused much of their attention on the pastels, watercolors, gouaches, pen-and-ink, and charcoal drawings of the superstars of modernism, including Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and Joan Miro from the early years in France, to the American masters Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, and Roy Lichtenstein. 

Their sizable collection of Mr. Johns’s work includes examples from his “Numbers” and “Flag” series. The Pollock drawing is one of the artist’s later works, when he became taken with the absorption of ink on mulberry paper.

Sotheby’s describes the collection as “meticulously built” and unprecedented, with an “emphasis on the highest quality and rarity throughout.” The couple plan to use proceeds to benefit their foundation, which supports causes related to science and medicine, educational reform and innovation, and cultural projects. 

They have spent much of their professional life serving the public and promoting culture. Dr. Diamonstein-Spielvogel has served as a White House staff assistant, the first director of cultural affairs in New York City, the first woman vice chair of the United States Commission of Fine Arts, New York City Landmarks Preservation commissioner, and chairwoman of the New York State Council on the Arts. Ambassador Carl Spielvogel is a board member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Philharmonic Symphony Society of New York, and the Asia Society. In addition, he had a long career in advertising, marketing, and investment management, helping found companies that continue to bear his name.

In a press release, Dr. Diamonstein-Spielvogel said “Consistent with our long-held view that we are, each of us, temporary custodians of all we possess, we must treat stewardship with great care. It is our hope that future collectors will experience genuine delight from the works presented, and that through the Diamonstein Spielvogel Foundation, the artists represented will derive great satisfaction from the fact that many others will benefit for many years to come from the future exchange of ideas, staunch adherence to intellectual and cultural excellence, and a healthy disregard for the impossible.”  

This fall, highlights from the collection will be exhibited in Sotheby’s galleries in Hong Kong, London, Paris, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago before going on view in full in New York City on Oct. 27. The collection will be included in the larger sale of Impressionist and Modern Art to be held on Nov. 14 and 15 and the Contemporary Art sale on Nov. 16 and 17.

In the Nov. 16 sale, Sotheby’s is also featuring “Female Head,” a 1977 painting by Roy Lichtenstein, a longtime resident of Southampton. The painting, from what some call his Surrealist period, is expected to sell for between $10 million and $15 million. It was acquired by the Leo Castelli Gallery and has been since held by Elizabeth R. Rea and the late Michael M. Rea, who also amassed a notable art collection in their lifetimes. 

According to Sotheby’s, “Female Head” is “one of [Lichtenstein’s] most complex meditations on ‘art about art.’ ” It is also “a visual tour of Roy Lichtenstein’s oeuvre; from the signature blonde to the female figure, the Ben-Day dots to the brushstroke, and finally the mirror to the picture frame, all of his trademarks are present in this work.”

Ms. Rea is a fine art photographer who has worked as a freelance and associated curator on many museum exhibitions, often focused on the work of Lichtenstein, who died in 1997. Her career included stints at the Museum of Modern Art and at Castelli’s gallery and she served as a director of an adjunct gallery of Castelli’s devoted to Joseph Cornell’s work. She serves the Peggy Guggenheim Advisory Board in Venice and Symphony Space in New York, and is an honorary trustee of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

A portion of the proceeds from this sale will also benefit a foundation. In this case, it is the Dungannon Foundation, which is the sponsor of the Rea Award for the Short Story. The painting will be on view in London before it is exhibited in New York prior to the sale.

Anyone who knows Marianna Levine and has seen her embrace a multitude of roles in journalism and the arts on the South Fork might be surprised to learn that she has a background in acting and writing plays and novels.

All of those worlds will come together Tuesday night in the reading of a play, “A Night in Manoa,” at Guild Hall as part of the JDT Lab of performance works in progress. The play is the result of the clearing of a major bout of writer’s block that beset Ms. Levine some years ago and caused her to leave several incomplete projects on the shelf. 

Given all of the hats she has been wearing recently, “I consider myself a writer above anything,” she said last week. After working with Colson Whitehead at the Stony Brook Southampton Writers Conference several years ago, she developed a terrible case of writer’s block and found herself working for the Hamptons International Film Festival, The Sag Harbor Express, Guild Hall, and other places where she could still make use of a creative outlet.

A health scare last year brought her regrets about her unfinished projects back into focus. “After the thought of not being around for my family, the next most devastating thought was ‘Oh no, I didn’t finish the novel or the screenplay.’ ”

She began to write again, a lot. She mentioned her newly inspired writing to Josh Gladstone, the director of Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater and its programs. He asked her if she had done a play. The next thing she knew, she had a date on the Guild Hall calendar, otherwise known as a deadline.

Since she already had the core idea of a story in novel form, she said, she decided to adapt that plot as a play. Two sisters return to Hawaii to bury their mother’s ashes in the garden of the house they had lived in two decades earlier. An old friend re-enters their lives, and the connections that bind their families together — including surviving the Holocaust — are as strong as ever, even after so much time has passed. Inspired by incidents from her life, the play examines whether what happens in love and life comes down to chance or fate. 

The reading will be enhanced by Hawaiian music performed live, palm trees on the stage.

Although the reading, which begins at 7:30 p.m., is free, reservations are required through the Guild Hall website. A $27 prix fixe menu is available at the 1770 House before the reading — the reservation code is JDT Lab.

In partnership with the Jam Session, the Southampton Arts Center will present a concert by the South African All-Stars on Saturday at 7 p.m. 

One of the pioneers of Cape Jazz, Morris Goldberg, who plays the saxophone and pennywhistle, counts among his influences both South African and American jazz. In addition to touring with Paul Simon, Bakithi Kumalo has played bass with Joan Baez, Herbie Hancock, the Tedeschi Trucks Band, and many others.

Diego Urcola, a trumpet player and three-time Grammy nominee, has been a member of the Paquito D’Rivera Quintet since 1991. David Bravo, a pianist from Cape Town, has recorded with Harry Belafonte, Jack Bruce, Debbie Harry, and Hugh Masekela, among others. 

Claes Brondal of Sag Harbor, co-founder and musical director of the Jam Session, seen weekly at Bay Burger in Sag Harbor, will round out the group on drums. Tickets are $15 and include a preconcert reception at 6:30.

In conjunction with the center’s exhibition “Odd Beauty: The Techno-Eccentric World of Steampunk,” the English musician and producer Thomas Dolby, a Steampunk icon whose hit singles include “She Blinded Me With Science” and “Hyperactive,” will present a talk and performance on Sunday at 6 p.m. Tickets are $25.

The Montage Music Society will present the world premiere of “The Astronomer’s Key,” a new work by the Shelter Island composer Bruce Wolosoff, at the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art in Roswell, N.M., on Sunday. The East Coast premiere will take place on Oct. 15 in Medford, Mass., in the Distler Concert Hall at Tufts University. 

“The Astronomer’s Key,” commissioned by the Roswell Artists in Residence Foundation, was inspired by three paintings by Milton Resnick. The programs will also include “The Loom,” music inspired by the watercolors of Eric Fischl.

Although many treat “Abstract Expressionism” as a uniquely American phenomenon, its emotional bravura approach to art-making did inspire artists in Europe to participate in a free exchange of ideas, resulting in their own Art Informel movement.

There were others though, who were not so free to express themselves or who did not have direct access to these ideas. Yet somehow these artists too, in Soviet Bloc countries during the 1950s and 1960s, managed to discover what their colleagues were doing elsewhere and began reacting to it.

The results of these efforts are included in a small but powerful exhibition at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs, featuring artists from Eastern Europe who bucked the conventions and limitations imposed by their Communist lead­ers. 

Andrej Jemec from Slovenia, Tadeusz Kantor from Poland, Jan Kotik from the former Czechoslovakia, Edo Murtic from Croatia, and Romul Nutiu from Romania were notable not just in their success in seeking out developments in art that were being deliberately withheld from them, but in remaining in their countries and making art under their own terms.

Kantor, one of the most visionary of paint­ers in the room, was also the most well traveled. He was a painter and theater director who let both aspects of his creative life interact on the canvas, and his 1958 “Composition” is an apocalyptic explosion of drips and clouds of light and dark paint. It’s hard not to see figures or faces in the abstract soup, perhaps a holdover from his earlier style from the 1940s, where tangled and deformed figures made up the compositions. This particular work, created well after the war, still seems haunted by it.

Kantor moved on at a point when others also had fled action painting, incorporating found objects into his compositions. In “Chelsea,” a shopping bag has been mounted to the canvas and bathed in layers of black paint so that it is almost unrecognizable. A cluster of circular blobs of color accompany it. He sought out “reality of the lowest rank,” says the show’s catalog, to ennoble in his paintings, including umbrellas, rags, and crumpled paper, following in the path of Neo-Dadaists such as Robert Rauschenberg.

Jemec, who is represented by two relatively large canvases from 1960, uses black bands of paint to carve up his grayish and white ground. In the painting “In the Forest,” it seems as if the day or night sky is concealed by a skeletal canopy. “Battle” also features what could be a sky obscured, this time possibly by planes and explosions, hinted at by the touches of red and yellow in the mix and what could be a plume of smoke. It is difficult not to see the psychological impacts of the Cold War and its threat of mutually assured destruction in the artwork.

Kotik was a Czech who spent his later years in Sweden and West Berlin. His work on view is from his gestural abstraction period after 1948. “Calligraphy (Black Painting),” from 1961, is a collection of white lines of various thicknesses, accumulated in a rounded figure with lines descending beneath it. It is vaguely reminiscent of a fish or other sea creature, or even a mushroom cloud, spindly and tinged with menace. His “Painting 22” is an assemblage of uneven orbs in different hues. In the spaces in between are brush marks and groups of lines in a very flat presentation.

The geometric abstractions of Murtic are reminiscent of Adolph Gottlieb in one and Kasimir Malevich in another. They were known in what was then Yugoslavia as “Socialist Modernism.” The country differed from others in Eastern Europe in that it was able to break ties with Stalin’s U.S.S.R. in 1948, which allowed a more permissive government and cultural environment. Murtic was in this country from 1951 to 1952 and met such local celebrities from the New York School of painting as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and James Brooks. His art was shown in a traveling exhibition of Yugoslavian art that went to Manhattan, Boston, and Washington, D.C. 

A Romanian, Nutiu was a late arrival to the world of action painting, but his works on view, painted in 1966 and 1970, are strong examples of the genre. He developed his compositions in troughs of water, into which he poured oil paint. As the colors bled on the surface, he played with them with a stick, blending them into compositions. When they were to his liking he placed a canvas on the surface to absorb the paint. The resulting works have very fluid elements, some that look like bubbles, or basic cellular creatures, or just an overall blending of forms and linear marks that feel at a remove from the artist’s hand.

The works at Pollock-Krasner come from a broad base of international institutions and collections, which include Moderna galerija in Ljubljana; the Muzeum Sztuki, in Lodz; the Muzej Suvremene Umjetnosti in Zagreb, and the Fundatia Joana Grevers in Munich.

The exhibition will remain on view through Oct. 28.

The 25th Hamptons International Film Festival begins today. By the time it is over on Monday, it will have screened a roster of 65 features and 50 short films, both narrative and documentary. With so much to choose from and many films in competition, a small cross section of reviews and previews follows for those who want to see something more adventurous than the blockbusters-in-waiting on the schedule. 

“The Last Pig”

Allison Argo

East Hampton, Sunday, 2 p.m.; Bay Street Theater, Monday, 2 p.m.

“The Last Pig” is Allison Argo’s subtle but moving documentary about a pig farmer’s coming to terms with the emotional toll his vocation has taken on him. The director follows Bob Comis around his picturesque upstate farm through the seasons, often at ground level, from the point of view of his pigs.

His voiceover describes his daily experience with the animals, his early inner conflict, and his dawning realization that “I no longer understand why a pig is food and a dog is part of the family” when the former has the same depth and range of emotions as the latter.

It is clear Mr. Comis has tried to make their lives on his farm as humane and happy as he can. But every week he brings a group of them to the slaughterhouse, and it’s difficult to understand how he was able to do so for a decade. 

The pigs are charming, silly, and heartbreaking. They chomp on grasses and feed, roll in the dirt and mud, nuzzle Mr. Comis’s ­Continued from C1

hands, and take long naps in the sun. It is wonderful to hear the relief in the farmer’s voice as he nears the end of his animal farming, but also sobering to realize that the end means that the remaining pigs still have to go somewhere.

Parts of the film were goosebump-inducing on a warm sunny day. The film festival was wise to schedule the one-hour screenings midday on Sunday and Monday. It’s an affecting film that doesn’t sensationalize its subject; it doesn’t need to.

A panel discussion will follow Sunday’s screeming.  Jennifer Landes

“The Dead Nation” 

Radu Jude

East Hampton, tomorrow, 5:45 p.m.,  Monday, 6:15 p.m. 

“The Dead Nation,” a chronicle of the rise of anti-Semitism in Romania in the years leading up to and including World War II, will not be to everyone’s liking, taking the viewer, as it does, down a bleak road with stops at the way stations of nationalism and militarism before we reach “the Jews’ humiliation as new pariahs,” as we hear in the film, and, even worse, their torture, killing, and exile to camps. 

 But this is a film that everyone watching United States national politics unfold in these extraordinary times, incredulous, will be drawn into and, perhaps, should watch as a cautionary tale. The tale of those times is told through a series of rough black-and-white prints, archival images of concerts and picnics that lay an ordinary baseline from which the horror rises. Military anthems, nationalist speeches, and a narrator reading passages from the journal of a Jewish doctor fill in the blanks. 

The story is made all the more hair-raising by its simplicity and its contemporary significance. While not an inviting film, either visually or in its subject matter and tone, it draws the viewer in, quietly layering the events of year after year of a march toward atrocities like lines of a poem or paving stones, making it clear that the first step, or two, can lead to an end not initially foreseen. Then. But now, we have the example of history before us.  

“So much darkness in this hateful century,” the film’s narrator reads from the doctor’s journal. “No wonder destructions will follow.”  Joanne Pilgrim

“Disappearance”

Ali Asgari

East Hampton, tomorrow, 10:15 a.m.; Southampton, Saturday, 12:30 p.m.

“Disappearance,” the first feature film of the Iranian director Ali Asgari, whose “The Silence” was named best narrative short at last year’s festival, is a mystery, but not a whodunit. More like a what-is-it and will-they-solve-it?

The film opens at night as a woman emerges from a car and walks along a deserted urban street until she comes to a hospital emergency room. This is Sara, a 19-year-old university student who tells the admitting nurse that she has been raped. She is taken to a female doctor who examines her, sees that she is bleeding, and says she needs to have surgery.

We soon gather the rape story is a lie concocted with her boyfriend, Hamed, to explain her excessive vaginal bleeding, which the film hints is the result of consensual sex. What follows is a very long night of the couple’s unsuccessful efforts to find a doctor in Tehran who will treat Sara without notifying her family. 

Sara and Hamed are helpless in the face of her family’s conservative views about sex and a medical bureaucracy harnessed by rules. The deserted nighttime streets and empty hospital waiting rooms add to the sense of the characters’ isolation from the world around them and from each other. 

Mr. Asgari’s understated stylistic approach adds to the tension and sense of alienation. Long scenes take place in real time and include two-shots of the principals with very little dialogue or emotion and long tracking shots following them down empty corridors and sidewalks. Often when one character takes some action, such as talking to a doctor, the camera stays with the other, who might be sitting motionless in a car or waiting room.

“Disappearance” is an edgy shaggy dog story, one that maintains a constant level of tension by focusing not on what the problem is, but on the characters’ inability to solve it and the world’s indifference.  Mark Segal

“En el Septimo Dia”

Jim McKay

East Hampton, Sunday, 12:45 p.m.

Let’s get something straight: This movie is about football, okay? Football, or, in this case, futbol; just don’t call it soccer. Because the central characters in “En el Septimo Dia” (“On the Seventh Day”) are from Mexico and the film’s director, Jim McKay, scores a point for authenticity by not having the word “soccer” appear in the subtitles. 

Marking the director’s return to feature filmmaking after eloquent indies such as “Girls Town” and “Our Song” made over a decade ago, this empathetic Brooklyn-set drama offers a timely, compassionate, and sometimes humorous look at life in New York as an undocumented Mexican immigrant — especially pertinent material for viewing in the Hamptons. Mr. McKay even chose nonprofessionals for the roles of the dozen or so immigrant characters, found during open auditions around Sunset Park. The main character, Jose (Fernando Cardona, recruited while running in the park), delivers a captivatingly soulful performance, with layers of complexity slowly unfolding through the story. 

Jose works long hours Monday through Saturday doing bicycle deliveries for a hipster Caroll Gardens restaurant (La Fontera, or “the frontier,” a name that cannot be coincidental) then spends his day off playing futbol in Sunset Park. When the movie opens, his team, named after their home state of Puebla, has clinched a spot in the championship game the following Sunday. But on Monday, Jose’s boss announces that he needs him to work on exactly that day to help with a swanky private party. As the team’s star player, Jose spends the week quietly wrestling with the classic conundrum: duty or pleasure? Or, as he puts it when he finally confides in his fellow Poblanos, “Either we get slaughtered or I get fired.” 

Charles Libin, the cinematographer, offers a documentary directness that goes bone-deep to capture the everyday struggles and camaraderie between these men who work as laborers, dishwashers, and street vendors. “En el Septimo Dia” is ultimately a story of human dignity, beautifully told through an unhurried and uncomplicated lens, much like the game of futbol.  

Incidentally, several of the cast members lost their jobs during the making of the film for taking too many days off.  Judy D'Mello

“Hondros”

Greg Campbell

East Hampton, tomorrow, 1:30 p.m., panel immediately following

It is a rare film that leaves a viewer feeling privileged to have seen it, but “Hondros,” winner of the 2017 Brizzolara Family Foundation Award, is such a film. 

Chris Hondros was one of the most esteemed conflict photographers of his generation, having covered over a 12-year period wars in Kosovo, Liberia, Nigeria, Angola, Sierra Leone, Iraq, Egypt, and Libya, where he was killed in a mortar attack during the Battle of Misrata in 2011.

The documentary opens with Hondros in the midst of street fighting in Liberia in 2003. The cinéma vérité images of rebels and government troops fighting for control of a bridge are intercut with Hondros’s remarkable still photographs of the battle. 

One image from that firefight captured a shirtless young government commander leaping in celebration after having fired a rocket-propelled grenade at rebel positions. The photograph was published worldwide. Hondros’s dedication to getting the story is expressed by his comment on that particular battle: “You had to be on the bridge, not 50 feet away.”

While the film is a powerful, nuanced portrait of Hondros, directed by his longtime friend Greg Campbell, it opens a wide window onto the world of international combat photographers, many of whom worked with Hondros and talk about his commitment, courage, and generosity.

Jonathan Klein, the cofounder of Getty Images, for whom Hondros worked, summed up his approach: “For Chris, the story was always about the people being impacted by the disaster or conflict, as opposed to the disaster itself.” Years after taking the iconic photograph on the bridge in Liberia, Hondros returned to that country, found the former soldier, Joseph Duo, and arranged for him to go to school by paying for the fees, books, and uniforms. Mr. Duo eventually became a police officer.

The subject of this often shattering but inspirational documentary encapsulated his career and the world he lived in with the words, “So much devastation, so much humanity at its best.”  Mark Segal

“Larger Than Life: 

The Kevyn Aucoin Story”

Tiffany Bartok

East Hampton, Saturday, 6 p.m.; South­ampton, Sunday, 5:15 p.m.

In the early 1980s in the lobby of Vogue, Kevyn Aucoin made himself as much of a fixture as a floor lamp, and similarly shaped, given his height and rail-thin frame. He was friendly, with a Southerner’s manners. He had a portfolio of his makeup work, so someone gave him a break and took a look, and then another break — an actual assignment — and the result, in that glittery era of huge hair and bright colors and heavy eye shadow and prominent blush, was a revelation: It was spare and natural, “nude,” as they say, and improbably it changed the course of the industry.

“Larger Than Life” makes wonderful use of home movies — Super 8 and videotape in the decades before the ease and ubiquity of the iPhone — as well as Aucoin’s own scrapbooks and Polaroids, meticulously kept as if to establish the reality of his life’s pinch-me unreality. He went from growing up gay in northwest Louisiana in the 1960s — he was regularly beaten up, and a teacher would pull his pants down and spank him in front of the class for the crime of effeminacy — to the height of the fashion industry, its first superstar makeup artist. In the telling, we are treated to ample interviews, from lovers to awed colleagues to the likes of a disarmingly funny Paulina Porizkova and a brutally honest and self-critical Tori Amos. 

Aucoin had a personality to match his size, and a perfectionist’s knack for taking over any photo shoot he was involved in and even TV crews’ lighting when he was being interviewed. So let’s let him have the floor, as at the Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards, which honored him as no makeup artist had been before: “You see, in the context of my life, this award means that I not only survived my past, but that I succeeded.”  Baylis Greene

“Mountain”

Jennifer Peedom

East Hampton, tomorrow, 10:45 a.m.; Southampton, 3 p.m.

An orchestra tunes up, Willem Dafoe says a few words from a sound booth, the instruments begin playing. Then, a jagged mountain peak looms across the screen. So begins “Mountain,” an Australian film by Jennifer Peedom that celebrates the world’s greatest summits and the people who interact with them.

The Austrailian Chamber Orchestra and its guest musicians provide a nonstop soundtrack of inspirational and apt interludes by Beethoven, Grieg, Vivaldi, and original compositions from Richard Tognetti as the camera captures ranges from all seven continents including countries such as Argentina, South Africa, Canada, Austria, Nepal, India, Greenland, Pakistan, and Scotland.

Not only a celebration of the terrain, the film is more of an examination of human interaction with the peaks, including the legends and lore inspired by them and the radical extremes that adventurers go to in order to scale them, ski down them, or survive them.

Obviously, as large as home television screens are currently, the film would be at its best projected in a theater. In choosing her subject and the multiple angles or sources of photography employed to portray the holy men in a mountaintop temple or the adventurers wearing suits that make them look like mechanical flying squirrels, Ms. Peedom displays understanding and love of film that seems to underlie the endeavor. 

It was a film hard to watch at home; there was always the sense that a good portion of its impact remained untapped. In this way, Ms. Peedom commands the audience to go to the theater, as “Mountain” will not come to them, at least not in the way she envisioned it.  Jennifer Landes

“Wanderland”

Josh Klausner

East Hampton, tomorrow, 8 p.m.; Bay Street Theater, Saturday, 3:45 p.m.

What can you say about a movie that starts and ends with garden gnomes? The main character in “Wanderland” comes to the East End for a weekend in a borrowed house and finds himself launched into a nightlong series of unlikely occurrences and calamities, as in a Grimm’s tale or an acid trip, but the series of kooky circumstances and bizarre encounters felt mostly, to this viewer, contrived and foolish rather than fanciful. 

While it was fun to see familiar places and faces, at times I couldn’t decide if I could cotton to this as a romp-like, magical realism-tinged Odyssey or if I was just annoyed by juvenile jokes and strange turns of fate that seemed inserted just for the sake of being strange. 

The fairy-tale allusions and archetypes came through clearly among the absurdities, and the directors used some clever parallels in telling this story of a Hamptons weekend gone warped. At its best moments this film was poignant and sweet, and interestingly shot, with some beautiful photography. 

After a dusk-to-dawn sojourn looking for the broken-down rental car that has been towed from a beach parking lot for lack of a resident’s sticker, locating the house where he is staying, and seeking the Master of the Wind at a beach party in Amagansett, who can provide him the answers, in the happy, welcome ending, our seeker ultimately finds what he is really looking for: love and healing. 

Joanne Pilgrim

Sitting at Gosman’s Topside restaurant, overlooking Montauk Harbor on a perfect September afternoon, the stories flowed from Jack Douglas like the tide, epic tales of musical genius, and sometimes madness. Between a plate of clams on the half shell, the music producer best known for long and close associations with John Lennon and Aerosmith recalled a lifetime of creation, onstage and, especially, in the studio.

“You’re facilitating a dream,” Mr. Douglas said of his work. “You may have to write, you may have to rewrite, you have to arrange most of the time. You’re dealing with tremendous egos, some problem children, some people that are just blessed with talent, and a lot of other things.”

A Bronx native and veteran of New York City’s legendary Record Plant Studios, Mr. Douglas, who lives in Nyack and Los Angeles, has vacationed in Montauk for more than 40 years. “In fact, I played in a band early in the ’60s, and the organ player’s family had a fish market in New Jersey,” he said. “They used to come out here to buy their fish. I accompanied them on a trip — this was a quite different place.”

“I used to come earlier in the season,” he said, “but this place has gotten a little crazy, so for the last few years I come in September, when it’s over.”

“A little crazy” could define Mr. Douglas’s career. In November 1965, he and Edward Leonetti, a fellow musician, obsessed with the Beatles’ inimitable sound, set out for its source: Liverpool, England. “The cheapest way was by tramp steamer,” he said. “People would say to me, ‘You’re crossing the North Atlantic in late November?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, so what? I’ve been on the Staten Island ferry.’ ”

 The “rusty old tin can” pulled into ports like Boston, St. John’s, Halifax, Iceland, Norway, Aberdeen, “wherever there was something for it to take from one place to another.” He and Mr. Leonetti were the sole passengers. “The rest was a crew of pirates that were drunk most of the time. It was like, ‘Who’s in charge here?’ It was a harrowing trip.”

Three weeks later in Liverpool, armed with guitars and amplifiers but no return tickets, visas, or work permits, the would-be pop stars were detained on the vessel by immigration officials. “I told my friend, ‘I got you into this mess, I’ll get you out of it,’ ” he said. “I think that’s been the story of my life.” Donning a sort of disguise, Mr. Douglas snuck off the ship, found a record shop, and bought the Beatles’ just-released “Rubber Soul” album.

“I saw the Liverpool Echo, the biggest newspaper in Liverpool, and thought, these English journalists like sensational stuff,” he recalled. “I’ll tell them this story about being held captive on a ship.” His tale piqued the interest of an editor, who arranged media coverage that ultimately reached London, the center of the pop-music universe.

Embarrassed immigration officials relented, granting them student visas, and the Echo editor put them in a band. “It was going to be his continuing coverage of the Yanks in Liverpool,” he said. “It was amazing. We saw lots of incredible bands, bought records, sent press back to New York.” Until Her Majesty had had enough, that is. Without warning, the now-famous “crazy Yanks” were handcuffed, thrown into a car, onto a train, and then a ship bound for the United States. “Because we had been to Liverpool and sent back all this stuff about what stars we were, we got into really good bands,” he said.

Some years later, Mr. Douglas, now a junior engineer at the Record Plant, told this tale to Lennon, who was recording his “Imagine” album there and had wandered into the studio where Mr. Douglas was editing tapes. Finally, the star-struck engineer told Lennon that he had been to Liverpool. “I said, ‘I was a musician, I wanted to know everything there was about how that music was being made.’ ” How did that work out? Lennon asked. “ ‘Good and bad. Bad, I got deported, but good, I made a lot of noise before I did.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Crazy Yanks! It’s  you, isn’t it?’ ”

Thus began a relationship that would continue until Lennon’s death. “Soon I was getting a ride home every day, talking with him, hanging out. He asked for my phone number, and he called one day and asked if I wanted to go to a party. He said, ‘Just watch my back, because I’m not sure about these people.’ It was Abbie Hoffman, the whole crew, looking to take advantage of him.”

Between Liverpool and Lennon, Mr. Douglas, with Mr. Leonetti, the drummer Tommy Brannick, and Paul Venturini, the organist whose family owned  the New Jersey fish market, founded a band called Privilege. The group had a sound akin to Led Zeppelin’s in mind; the Isley Brothers, who wanted a rock ’n’ roll band on their new T-Neck label, had other ideas. 

“It sounded great,” Mr. Douglas said. “A lot of ambient sound, very heavy, a lot of space. I think that space is what got us in trouble.” The Isley Brothers, fresh from their R&B/funk hit “It’s Your Thing,” mixed the album and, unbeknownst to the band, added all manner of instrumentation and backing vocals. “What sounded big and huge in the rough mixes,” Mr. Douglas said, “was now a tiny little ball surrounded by all this other stuff.”

“ ‘This is neither hard rock nor R&B,  really,’ ” Mr. Douglas told the Isleys. “ ‘It’s somewhere in the middle, or nowhere. It’s in the middle of nowhere.’ I thought I was getting my point across, and O’Kelly Isley looked at me and said, ‘Well fuck you,’ and the three of them got up and walked out of the room. Then Rudolph, who was the oldest and smartest, came back and said, ‘You have a problem with it? You mix it.’ ”

Over the next two days, Mr. Douglas watched as Tony May, the recording engineer, mixed the tracks, minus the Isleys’ overdubs. “It was marvelous, incredible to watch the man work,” Mr. Douglas said. “I just thought, this is the most amazing thing. When it was done, I listened back and said, ‘I want to do this. I’ve never had so much control over anything in my life.’ ” Mr. May told him about a new studio, Record Plant.

Now entrenched at the Midtown studio, Mr. Douglas was recording the New York Dolls’ debut album, produced by Todd Rundgren. “Todd hated the band,” Mr. Douglas said. “They were hot, and they were doing something no one else was doing — proving that you could be a band that didn’t know how to play their instruments but still have a sound.”

When Mr. Rundgren stopped coming to sessions, Mr. Douglas and the Dolls continued without him. “Management, which was Leber-Krebs, said, ‘You should get a co-production credit. You’re not going to . . . but we manage a baby band. They’ve already done one record, it’s not really going anywhere. They’re in Boston, why don’t you go up and take a look?’ ” “I went to meet Aerosmith, and we got along immediately. The first thing we talked about was the Yardbirds,” the pioneering blues band that, along with the Beatles, launched the second wave of rock ’n’ roll, this time from across the Atlantic. “We had so much in common.” An association that yielded classic 1970s albums including “Toys in the Attic” and “Rocks” continues in the new century with “Honkin’ On Bobo” and 2012’s “Music From Another Dimension!” He also recorded Aerosmith’s 1978 cover of the Lennon-penned Beatles song, “Come Together.”

In 1980, Lennon called on Mr. Douglas to produce “Double Fantasy,” his first recording in five years. With the album completed and released, the two were working on new material on Dec. 8. “It was a short piece of music,” Mr. Douglas remembered of the track that became “Walking on Thin Ice,” sung by Lennon’s wife, Yoko Ono. “I made a loop out of it, then we added some more instruments that John and I played. We were playing guitar solos, we were having a riot, then Yoko laid over that brilliant spoken-word.”

Once again, Mr. Douglas was Lennon’s neighbor, now on the Upper West Side. “I would go home with him every night and then walk four blocks to my house,” he said. But now he was simultaneously producing another artist, and had to remain at the studio. “We were going to meet in the morning to master the single.” A short time later, Lennon was shot and killed as he arrived home. “Then the tape started playing in my head, that if I had gone home with him, I would have seen the guy standing there. . . . That tape ran for years, and it didn’t do me any good at all.”

There is so much more: Recording the Who’s “Who’s Next” at Record Plant. Driving through a hurricane to record Patti Smith’s “Radio Ethiopia.” Discovering Cheap Trick, performing at a bowling alley in Waukesha, Wisc. And, next month, Mr. Douglas will produce the Yardbirds, who will record at Aerosmith’s private studio. 

“My quest,” he said, “is to get the three ex-guitar players, graduates of ‘Yardbirds School,’ to play a solo.” The presence of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page on a new Yardbirds recording would surely constitute a sort of Holy Grail, the vessel that, according to legend, was brought from the Last Supper to England and holds the power to bestow infinite happiness and eternal youth. This is how, more than 60 years on, rock ’n’ roll lives.