The Irish director and screenwriter Terry George, known for powerful films like “Hotel Rwanda” and “In the Name of the Father,” co-written with and directed by Jim Sheridan, has been a recurring presence at the Hamptons International Film Festival since his directorial debut, “Some Mother’s Son,” opened the festival in 1996. This year, Mr. George, who has a house in Noyac, is back with his first short film, “The Shore.”

    “It’s a great festival, one that clearly is accessible to the local community, a people’s festival, yet it’s able to attract the cream of the independent film industry,” Mr. George said by e-mail last week from London, where he was finishing up post-production on “Whole Lotta Sole,” starring Colm Meaney and Brendan Fraser. “I try to get involved whenever I’m actually back in Sag in the fall.”

    Mr. George brought “Hotel Rwanda” here in 2004. He has since served as a juror for the festival’s Films of Conflict and Resolution competition, dealing with issues and areas of turmoil around the world, and is on the Conflict and Resolution Advisory Board.

    Outside of the film world, Mr. George has been heavily involved in issues of conflict resolution, particularly on the African continent through the aid organization Concern Worldwide, which also works in Haiti and the Far East. “I try to do what I can to help.”

    But with themes of personal and political conflict running throughout his films, “The Shore,” which he produced with his daughter, Oorlagh George, is a more lighthearted piece — the story of two friends who went their separate ways as the problems in Northern Ireland escalated and who meet again 25 years later, both mistaken about the cause of their long estrangement. Set against the backdrop of County Down on the Northern Irish coast, where Mr. George spent childhood summers and still has a house, “The Shore” has some fabulous comedic moments, but to say too much could give it all away — it’s only 29 minutes long, after all.

    “It’s based on an incident that happened to my uncle years ago. He actually told it to Daniel Day-Lewis and me when we were researching ‘In the Name of the Father,’ and for 16 years I tried to figure out how to shoehorn it into a feature story. Then last year, after doing a lot of Hollywood work and needing a break from that grind, I talked to Oorlagh and said, To hell with it — let’s make ‘The Shore.’ ”     His daughter, he said, is “his chief critic and reality check.” She has worked as Clive Owen’s assistant, for an independent film company in Los Angeles, and as a personal assistant on Spike Lee’s film “Inside Man.”

    “I can confidently say that she will always give me the hard truth about a script, a cut of a film, or an idea. She pulls no punches, something you really need in this business, as sycophancy and collective delusion are serious problems. She is also a dynamic and relentless producer and turned ‘The Shore’ from my idea — a tiny little shoot where a couple of us would wander out and film — into a fully fledged and efficient film production.”

    The film stars Ciaran Hinds, Conleth Hill, Carry Condon, and Maggie Cronin, who also appears in Mr. George’s upcoming “Whole Lotta Sole.” His sister, Catherine George, did the costume design. (She was also costume designer for Lynne Ramsay’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” one of the festival’s Spotlight Films.)

    Though the premise and certainly the actors involved could have carried a feature-length movie, Mr. George said “The Shore” “holds together beautifully as a self-contained story, and it really showcases this beautiful region of Ireland which is well off the tourist trail. . . . My house in Ireland looks out on the bay, so we’d wander out each day and begin filming. It was the most enjoyable experience of my whole film career, and I think that comes across on screen.”

    Working on a short film, he said, he found “a purity and a clarity . . . that you’re often denied” in feature-length projects. “You have to get to the point both visually and in story terms and capture the essence of what you’re trying to say.”

    There’s a larger audience for short films than ever before, thanks in part to the Internet — Hulu, Netflix, and iTunes, among others, are giving shorts a lot of play beyond the festival circuit. Mr. George hopes to see “The Shore” released on Irish and British television around Christmas, and it has also been submitted for Oscar consideration.

    If it makes the cut, it won’t be the first time Mr. George has been in the running for an Oscar. He and his co-writer Keir Pearson were nominated for best original screenplay for “Hotel Rwanda,” and he shared the nomination with Jim Sheridan for best screenplay adaptation for “In the Name of the Father.” Mr. George and Mr. Sheridan also co-wrote “The Boxer,” which Mr. Sheridan directed, and “Some Mother’s Son.”

    Although some of his previous films have been set in his native Northern Ireland, “The Shore” marked the first time that Mr. George had actually shot a film there. Last spring, he returned to Northern Ireland to shoot “Whole Lotta Sole,” which he described as “a black comedy, with the underlying theme of Belfast after the Troubles — a new city with a new police force dealing with some old bad habits — and into this environment wanders a mysterious American.” The “sole” in the title refers to a fish market robbery that is the catalyst for the story, Mr. George explained. “It was great to be there working on a full-length feature.”

    While Mr. George is ever busy, the tough economic times in recent years have created a less hospitable climate for financing the kind of films he likes to make. “It’s been very hard, particularly since Hollywood has decided to go almost exclusively for remakes or ‘brand name’ films — superheroes, board games, etc. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been working more in Europe over the last year.”

    In fact, he hasn’t been back to his house in Noyac for almost a year, “and frankly, I can’t wait,” he said. “I love the fall there, the harvest, the fishing. . . .” He considers Sag Harbor his “home in America, but as I say to friends, ‘My clothes live there and I visit them occasionally.’ ”

    “The Shore” will be shown in East Hampton on Saturday at 10:30 a.m. and Monday at 6:30 p.m. as part of the East End Shorts program.

Carter Burwell chalks up his career to a series of fortunate accidents. Formally trained as a computer scientist, he studied animation and electronic music at Harvard, then wended his way to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he was the chief computer scientist for a few years. He has gone on — somewhat to his own surprise — to score more than 80 motion pictures, ranging from box-office biggies (“Twilight,” “Rob Roy,” “True Grit,” “Fargo”) to cult classics (“The Big Lebowski,” “Being John Malkovich,” “Gods and Monsters”) to darker works (“Howl,” “No Country For Old Men”).

    His latest studio project is the next installment in the teen-heartthrob phenomenon of “Twilight,” a cinematic juggernaut that continues  with the Nov. 18 release of “Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1.” Being hired to write the score for a sure-thing blockbuster is testament to Mr. Burwell’s immense success — although he says he is still downright surprised to be even making a living as a composer.

    “Around 1983, a bass player I knew was also a sound editor for movies, and he knew some of the bands I played in and the instrumental pieces that I wrote for this band, which were sort of moody,” he told The Star in a recent interview. “He knew the Coen brothers, who called me, and I went over and met with them. I was hired to work on ‘Blood Simple,’ their first film. They were just out of college, I guess we all were. I didn’t think I was embarking on a career. I thought, ‘This would be something different to do.’ ”

    The Coen brothers — whose extreme honesty Mr. Burwell found endearing  — explained that he shouldn’t expect to get paid for his work. “We were all surprised when it got distributed. And then people started calling me, and I realized that scoring was more instantaneous and emotionally satisfying than animation.”

 The rest, as they say, is history.

Mr. Burwell often works with influential but rather experimental or edgy directors like Spike Jonze, who allow him the freedom to create unique aural experiences on “Being John Malkovich” and “Where the Wild Things Are.”

    “Sometimes, directors have a very specific thing in mind and, honestly, it’s not that fun for me if they know exactly what they want,” Mr. Burwell said. “Some of the best directors — like Stanley Kubrick or Scorsese or Michael Mann — [are] all directors whose films I love to see [but that] doesn’t necessarily mean it would be fun to work on.”

    Mr. Burwell moved to Amagansett a little over a year ago; he now lives in a contemporary house perched on the edge of the ocean, a weathered gray affair filled with the colorful and comforting chaos of family life. His studio is also there.

    Mr. Burwell said that he had tested the waters of several coastal towns throughout the United States, including in Northern and Southern California, but had always avoided the East End because of its reputation as an elitist “social scene.” He expected Amagansett to be the very antithesis of the silent and beautiful landscape he had been seeking, but he discovered it there.

     He has found a new serenity in his surroundings. But, he said, with it comes a certain level of concern among colleagues about his mental health. “Living in New York made me an eccentric composer, but living in Amagansett . . . it’s obvious I’m mad,” he said with a laugh. “People want to be able to drop by a couple times a week. And living here, that’s not really possible. The Hollywood studios are not comfortable being so far away. They worry it’s going to get out of control, that money is going to be wasted in some way, and they won’t know about it until it’s too late. People only come to me if they know they really want me.”

    Mr. Burwell’s power was knocked out by the winds of Irene, just as he was in the final throes of his score for the latest “Twilight” movie. He was racing to meet a deadline that called for him to compose more than 80 minutes of music in just nine weeks, the time usually allotted to writing 40 minutes’ worth. It was an unprecedented test of his imagination and stamina.

    “The hurricane was interesting,” he said with a sigh, shaking his head. “I was hoping that maybe the power wouldn’t go out at all, but the day it went out, I worked on my piano with an oil lamp the way they would have 100 years ago. Then I worked plugged into my car’s cigarette lighter with my engine running. Then I worked in the neighbors’ kitchen, and finally I ran an extension cord from my neighbors’ generator to my house, but realized an extension cord wasn’t going to do it for me. I had to get on a plane to Abbey Road in London to record in two days, so I gave up and took the Jitney to the city. I just got back a few days ago, and I’m starting to feel more like a human.”

    Mr. Burwell said that his own world-view is rather more ironic than that of Bella and Edward and their vampire pot- boiler “Twilight” chums. The involvement of the director Catherine Hardwicke is what convinced him to become involved in the first “Twilight” movie, released in 2008, and the director of the latest installment, Bill Condon, has convinced him to sign up again.

    “Everything said and done is from the heart,” Mr. Burwell said of the series. “I understand that concept, but it’s not the way I write or see the world. If she wasn’t directing it, I wouldn’t have gone for it [in hte first place].”

    Mr. Burwell is also slated to do the second part of “Twilight: Breaking Dawn,” which will open in November of 2012. His “Twilight” years have brought him the most financial security he has ever known. Still, if he had his druthers, and could work in any genre, he would love the chance to do the score for a retro-flavored science-fiction film, something he has never done before. It would be the ideal coupling of his early studies in electronic and synthesized music and his hard-earned chops as an orchestral composer.

    Mr. Burwell spoke about the science-fiction B-movies that entertained audiences for decades, before the big-bucks smash “Star Wars” swept majestically onto the screen.

    “I’ve always been fond of science fiction,” he said. “And no one has ever asked me to do it. People don’t make those kinds of films anymore. ‘Forbidden Planet’ had an entirely electronic score before synthesizers even existed, they built their own circuitry. There was a tradition of pushing the boundaries of what constitutes a film score. That has been lost, and I really wish someone would ask me to write one.”

    Mr. Burwell participated for the first time last year in the Hamptons International Film Festival, taking a seat on the jury judging narrative features. He’ll be pitching in again this week, by presenting a talk at Rowdy Hall in East Hampton on Friday morning at 10; the discussion is expected to range from his early musical inspirations to his collaborations with legendary directors. He’ll also show clips of some of the films he’s worked on, including “The Kids Are All Right,” “True Grit,” and “Fargo.”

    “I’m happy to contribute in any way I can to cinema events out here,” he wrote in an email, “so I quickly agreed to do the panel, and the fact that it’s in a bar only sweetens the deal. Frankly I’m more interested in a dialogue than a monologue, so I’m hoping for good tough questions like, ‘Why the hell did you do that?’ ”

Design Awards in Southampton

    The American Institute of Architects’ Peconic Chapter will present an exhibit of architecture and an architectural design awards program at the Southampton Cultural Center on Saturday.

    The presentation of the Daniel Rowen F.A.I.A. Memorial Design Awards will be followed by a symposium led by the jurors and a discussion of the projects with the audience. The jury for the awards consists of John Belle, Mark Simon, and Carl Stein, all fellows of the institute

    On display will be exhibits from projects in Bridgehampton, Amagansett, Southampton, Sagaponack, East Hampton, Riverhead, Bellport, Quogue, Greenport, Southold, Water Mill, and Sag Harbor.

    The exhibit will be open from 5:30 to 9 p.m. on Saturday and begin with a reception.

Watermill’s New Residents

    This week, the Watermill Center announced its fall 2011 and spring 2012 residencies. This is the fifth year that the center will conduct this program, which invites artists to further their performance works in a home and laboratory environment. So far, 72 artists have taken up residency there in terms lasting up to six weeks.

    More than 180 artists applied for the 17 openings and were selected by a committee of artists and academics from various disciplines. The names of the individuals and groups chosen from other countries are Shirin Neshat and Abbas Akhavan from Iran, Alli Avital Tsypin and Krymov Lab from Russia, Shahryar Nashat and Adam Linder from Switzerland and Germany, Catarina de Oliveira and Camilla Willis from Portugal and the United Kingdom, The Wet Weather Ensemble from Australia, Theo Adams Company from the U.K., Katharina Schmitt from Germany, Melati Suryodarmo from Indonesia, Halldór Úlfarsson, Davyde Wachell, and Davio Brynjar Franzon from Iceland, and from the United States, Daniel Knox, the Lincoln Center Directors Lab, Anna Telcs, Samita Sinha, Tristan Perich and Argeo Ascani, and Christopher Williams.

    Works are presented to the public in free showcases throughout the term. The selection committee includes Marina Abramovic, John Rockwell, Jonathan Safran Foer, Alanna Heiss, Robert Wilson, and a wide range of international artists and academics.

Body of Work Returns

To Ashawagh

    “Body of Work VI,” a collection of figurative work by a group of contemporary artists, will return to Ashawagh Hall this weekend with a reception on Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m.

    The core group of artists includes Rosalind Brenner, John Capello, Michael Cardacino, Bob Markell, Bill Negron, Frank Sofo, and Margaret Weissbach, and in this show three new exhibitors will be added into the mix — Michael A. Butler, Terri Kennedy, and Cynthia Loewen.

    While the artists choose the figure as a subject, for many it is merely a starting off point for a more reflective and personal expression of it, as in Ms. Brenner’s painting. Others may maintain fealty to the form, but arrive at it in a more abstract way, such as the stippling Ms. Loewen employs in her work. Still others build forms of found objects, perhaps incorporating a bust in an unusual way as Ms. Kennedy does in a piece called “Maudie.”

    The exhibit will be on view Saturday through Sunday.

    It’s unusual that a photograph can make a painting come alive more than the painting itself, but that is often the case with the images in “Roy Lichtenstein in His Studio,” a book of photographs by Laurie Lambrecht of the artist’s studio in Southampton and him at work in it. Monacelli Press, an imprint of Random House, will publish the book on Tuesday.

    Ms. Lambrecht was a studio assistant of Lichtenstein’s for three years, and at the end of her first day of work she asked if she could bring her camera. She didn’t have much to do that day, as the artist would not be in the studio, so he accepted, and the result is in the richly illustrated book.

    The volume consists of a brief introduction by Dorothy Lichtenstein, the artist’s wife and the president of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, and then 60 full-color images, generously large. Most have an overleaf left blank on black or white paper, making for a pure and luxurious presentation.

    At the end of the book, Edward Robinson, the associate curator of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, considers the works and interviews Ms. Lambrecht for her insights about the images and her relationship with Lichtenstein. The essay section includes some of Ms. Lambrecht’s other work, among which is her documenting of Esteban Vicente in his Bridgehampton studio, a series on Robert Wilson’s chair collection in Water Mill, and a series of trees she has been working on most recently.

    In a concluding artist’s statement, Ms. Lambrecht, who lives in Bridgehampton and New York, said, “Looking at his paintings, I responded to the balance of the composition. It seems each of the elements has significant visual weight.” Reflecting on her work in the studio, she said, “I didn’t start out wanting to tell a story, have an exhibition, or publish a book. I was simply responding to my own curiosity and amazement.”   

“The Journals of Spalding Gray”
Edited by Nell Casey
Alfred A. Knopf, $28.95

    Creatives have the propensity to see life in quotations. However Job-like their experience, the proclivity and ability to turn it into art is ultimately a redeeming factor. Naturally the inclination to treat all of experience as a palette can also have a distancing effect. Nothing is ever taken at face value or enjoyed for what it is.

    Early on in his journals, Spalding Gray says, “Would you take one complete and happy pump me up to the sky swing on that swing — or would you rather have a life long photograph memory — correct artistic interpretation of the swing — goddamn it I’d take the art.”

    Nell Casey, who edited “The Journals of Spalding Gray,” points to a tradition of “confessional storytelling” that runs from Saint Augustine through Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sylvia Plath, and Richard Pryor. Monologues like “Swimming to Cambodia” and “Gray’s Anatomy” established Gray as a significant part of that tradition.

    Intimacy is of course the lingua franca of this kind of monologue, and as with the patient in therapy the monologuist is creating a narrative. The difference of course is that the primary motivation of the monologuist is to entertain and perform, while that of the patient is to get well. However, the willing suspension of disbelief that Gray was able to create, through his candid descriptions of sex and other elements of his personal life, may explain the shock and betrayal many fans felt when they learned he had thrown himself off a Staten Island ferry in 2004.

    In her introduction, Ms. Casey points out that “The feeling of public devastation that rose up after his death came in no small part from the fact that the decision to end his life — and the act itself — were so private. Gray, by virtue of the ongoing autobiography of his monologues, had promised to tell his audience everything.” Yet, “Gray could not reveal everything, not only because he knew the best stories were lively distillations, but also out of the fear that too bold a truth might alienate his followers. He craved the love of his audience — and his audience wanted only a representative of Spalding Gray. . . .” Samuel Beckett’s 20-minute monologue “Not I,” written in 1972 and comprised simply of a mouth moving in darkness, could have been Gray’s epitaph.

    If nothing else, “The Journals of Spalding Gray” is a colorful document of the avant-garde of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s — in particular Richard Schechner’s Performance Group and Elizabeth LeCompte’s Wooster Group — out of which Gray’s work derived (Gray co-founded the Wooster Group and was romantically involved with LeCompte). Ms. Casey describes how in “Rumstick Road,” the second of a trilogy of plays called “Three Places in Rhode Island,” “he stepped forward momentarily and addressed the audience as himself, thus beginning his career — and his particular cross to bear — in offering his life as art.” The influence of previous theatrical innovators like Thornton Wilder is also obvious in this watershed moment in Gray’s career. His breaking of the fourth wall recalls the stage manager in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” a role Gray would later play at Lincoln Center.

    Reading these journals one is impressed with the highly aestheticized provenance of Gray’s truth-telling. Plainly the monologue was as much a theatrical as a personal form for him, despite how much he depended on the candid and at times almost sensationalized rendering of his life experience. On the other hand, the exploitation of personal experience is itself one of the darker obsessions that Gray reveals in these journals. “I felt a slight feeling of loss and bitterness that these people were using me as their jester. Their poor entertainer who used his neurosis — his life for entertainment, that I was stuck somewhere as the poor artist that people came to see, to live off my pain and to say ‘there but for the grace of . . . go I’ a kind of unhappy Christ figure — a Woody Allen Wasp that cannot love and cannot make a lot money because the audience that identifies with me has no money.”

    Unlike the monologue, the journal is not a performance. There is no narrative, no story, just a succession of observations. So journals don’t carry the same burden as the performances. If the monologue gives only the appearance of truth, then a journal, which may or may not see the light of day, is more direct and immediate, a kind of free association that brooks little interference. Gray had the hope that his journals would provide “a more therapeutic way of splitting off a part of my self to observe another part.”

    The problem is that many of the entries either record endless trite and confessional details about sexual episodes with himself or others or epitomize the worst of psychobabble. “Renee thinks that I am both the boy and the mother,” he says describing a conversation with Renee Shafransky, another woman who played an important role in his life. “I want to be 12 again and also be the mother of myself and that I make women like her and Liz into the father and punish them by obsessing on the boy the way my mother did with ME and that I will only STOP doing this when it causes me too much pain and disaster in my life.”

    Whether the journals are more truthful or not, the watered-down psychology unfortunately reads as sententious self-dramatization. Describing a discussion about his childhood, Gray summarizes his friend Ken Kobland’s feelings about his family dynamic thus: “Mom was openly seductive with me (in the tub and elsewhere). I could not deal with it so I turned it all back on my own body and there it got stuck.”

    And then there are the quotidian renderings about sex (usually good), drinking (usually too much), and therapy (unusually obtuse), which are evidentiary without being revealing — though some of these are inadvertently funny at times. Here is a description of the aftermath of one passionate lovemaking session: “ ‘Oh Spalding’ and I said ‘yes’ and she said, ‘I think I’m going to be sick’ and at last she threw up.”

    There are dreams aplenty — which never seem to rise to the biblical. But isn’t that the thing about dreams? They tend to have more significance to the dreamer no matter how bizarre or prophetic. Though the diarizing often amounts to little more than verbal diarrhea, there are exceptions. In commenting on “Swimming to Cambodia,” he invokes Freud when he says, “as long as there is individuation there will be conflict and as long as there is conflict there will be war but individuation seems to be a necessary ground for being.”

    Inevitably the most interesting elements of the volume turn out to derive from the editor’s attempts to correlate the actions described to historic events in Gray’s life or previously published work. For instance, the diary entry about Gray’s involvement with a young Thai prostitute named Joy is no comparison to the section describing Joy in the published version of “Swimming to Cambodia” that Ms. Casey provides.

    Gray’s mother committed suicide, and these entries demonstrate the almost unfathomable power a parent’s suicide can have over a child. “Quite a number of years earlier, he had flirted with the notion that there were potential parallels between [our mother’s] life and his,” Ms. Casey quotes Gray’s brother Rockwell explaining. “That was built into his obsession with her suicide.”

    In his journals, Gray has no audience to spare, and the unmediated rawness with which he confronts his own death wish, particularly toward the end when he recapitulates his mother’s earlier trauma in his own move out of a beloved house during a period of mental instability, is perhaps the most profoundly disturbing element these entries reveal. If his audience would be shaken and surprised by the lack of forthcomingness in an artist who sought to create the illusion of truth-telling, then in his journals Gray was seemingly unafraid to unravel his own dark thoughts.

    On April 1, 1995, Gray made the following journal entry, “That is when suicide comes. It comes when the shadow part or let’s say the part of you that you hate starts to take over and fill up or push out all the other parts until you are all the part that you hate and there is this one little part left that is the killer and the killer is closely related to the self hate and at last it does its dirty little deed.” Knowledge of the psyche seemed to work in this nefarious way for Gray, providing the ammunition with which he was eventually able to end his life.

—

    Spalding Gray lived in Sag Harbor and, later, North Haven.

    Francis Levy, who lives in Manhattan and Wainscott, is the author of the novels “Erotomania: A Romance” and “Seven Days in Rio.” He blogs at TheScreamingPope.com.

    It’s common knowledge that Andy Warhol was an enigma. David Bailey’s 1973 documentary mediation on him for the BBC, shown on Friday at the Hamptons International Film Festival, does not change that perception and yet it does manage to further our understanding of his world and reveals some glimpses of his humanity.

    Undertaken at a time when his Pop Art icons were already firmly established in the art world, with their work then earning tens of thousands of dollars rather than the tens of millions now achieved at auction, “Warhol” is a look into Warhol’s role as filmmaker and his Factory studio Superstars, who played key roles in his life and his art.

    One thing remains clear: The artist spent as much time crafting and maintaining his image as he did his art.

    Mr. Bailey, a photographer and sometime filmmaker whose early life was the basis for the protagonist in the Michelangelo Antonioni film “Blow-Up,” was at the festival primarily to speak on a panel with Bruce Weber on Saturday night about his latest effort, a film called “Beaton by Bailey” on Cecil Beaton. Mr. Weber was in the audience at the Friday night screening and discussion, along with Calvin Klein, the clothing designer, art collector, and friend of Warhol.

    Warhol had a long association with the South Fork and owned an estate in Montauk. The film was made prior to that, but parts were still captured here, with Warhol on the beach walking a dog and mounting a horse in his own unusual way. Mr. Bailey could not remember where the footage was taken, but in the film both Bailey and Warhol refer to visiting “Jane’s house.” Jane is presumably Jane Holzer, a Factory Superstar and friend of Warhol’s who at the time owned a Meadow Lane property in Southampton that Warhol was known to frequent.

    Mr. Klein purchased the property a few years ago and leveled the castle-like structure that a later owner had erected and dubbed Dragon Head. Mr. Bailey photographed Ms. Holzer for British Vogue when she was modeling in the 1960s, which somehow completes the circle.

    “Warhol” was a complex and expensive production, involving hours of film footage shot every day for three weeks and often with Warhol nowhere to be found. Mr. Bailey said he incorporated a stand-in to function as Warhol, citing sphinx-like aphorisms in his stead to save money and offer some content and context for his film. When Warhol was around, Mr. Bailey said interviewing him “was like shooting a bullet in silk” and he often said nothing.

    Still, there are some moments where you catch the artist appearing to leave his shell, laughing or yawning at the actors making his films, and other little moments in which a glimmer of a real person shows through the mask.

    There is an interlude in a car on the way to the beach during which Mr. Bailey is driving and Warhol is seated way too close to him even though the front seat is otherwise empty. The discussion there is mostly about why he chose to sit in the middle, which was to avoid being hurt in a car crash, a subject he knew much about from his own artistic explorations of it.

    He said the car crash victims struck him in the same wayhe thought about unnamed people who invented buttons or who worked on the pyramids in Egypt. It seemed easier to capture this idea in “painting the people who die in car crashes, because you never know who they are.” As ludicrous as this sounds, his delivery of it feels true, and why not? He also offered that he stopped painting because “I bought a camera and a camera seemed so much easier.”

    Other more personal moments in the film come near the end, when the artist and the filmmaker are talking in bed together. “We went to bed, but it was a joke,” Mr. Bailey said. “He said, if you go to bed with me, I’ll make the film.” Warhol is fully clothed, at least on top. He tells the filmmaker that he is self-conscious about his chest because of the scars he had from bullet wounds. Five years prior to the filming in 1968, Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas, an acquaintance of his who was angry because he would not produce her screenplay.

    There are recollections by Factory regulars of the shooting, of Warhol pleading with her to stop, and his recovery. He described his chest as an “Yves St. Laurent dress, it’s all stitches,” but said the only thing that changed as a result of the shooting is that he didn’t take off his clothes after it. Others in the film said he was gentler because of it.

    Although made for British television, the piece still caused a controversy in its time. Mr. Bailey noted, “They had to change the law to show it.” One reason was that the film surpassed the allowable limit of three instances of the F-word.

    The other reason was a segment with Brigid Berlin, one of the stars of Warhol’s films and an actual Factory employee who sat at the front desk and transcribed interviews. She was also known for her Yves Klein-like creations in which she would apply paint to her breasts and press them to canvas, something she does in the film while she speaks to Warhol on the phone. “It got banned,” he said in his Cockney accent, “because Brigid painted with her titties.”

Members of the metropolitan area media donned hard hats last Thursday to catch up with the progress of the new Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, which is anticipated to open to the public in the fall of 2012.

    Those whizzing by, or crawling by, depending on the time of the day and the busy-ness of Hank’s Pumpkin Town across the Montauk Highway, may have been mystified by the extremely long, low building rising up out of a field on the north side of the highway. Although many had questioned why it seemed to occupy so much of the lot, in actuality, it does not. There is plenty of room both front and back. In order to flood the galleries with the intended mix of light to illuminate the artwork without overwhelming it, the building was placed on an axis allowing its windows to face true north.

    “The idea is to give the works the same kind of light for viewers that the artists were experiencing when they were making them,” Terrie Sultan, the Parrish’s executive director, said. Color-balanced fluorescents will supplement the light on less than ideal days or after dark.

    The project had a few iterations, the first being a kind of figure-8 amalgamation of studio-like spaces. This turned out to be overwhelming financially in the economic downturn, so rather than wait, perhaps indefinitely, for a dream that may never be realized, the Parrish’s board decided to build something else, enlisting the same architectural firm Herzog and de Meuron to do the redesign.

    Pierre de Meuron, a partner in the architectural firm, said on Thursday it was his first time seeing the site since construction started. “We were happy to have been able to work with these conditions,” and about half of the original budget. “This proves we can do strong architecture for less money. It’s a strong statement to make during difficult times.”

    At 34,500 square feet, the structure is about half the size of what was first envisioned. Ms. Sultan said its design was practically “activated by the sky” — its changes during the day and over the seasons.

    The land surrounding it will “emulate the progression of the landscape of eastern Long Island,” she said, with a wetland meadow on the south side and several kinds of indigenous plants increasing in size from shrubs to trees so “that the building will look like it just arrived on the property.” The parking lot will be screened from the building and its neighbors.

    With 2,600 artworks in the permanent collection, an aggressive acquisitions program, and only 4,500 square feet of exhibition space in the existing facility, on Job’s Lane in Southampton Village, those involved thought a new structure was sorely needed. The museum has had to alternate shows of work from the collection with loan exhibits, while the new building will allow them to be mounted simultaneously.

    There will be 12,000 square feet of exhibition space. Plans are to have significant elements of the permanent collection always on view in 7,500 square feet, with other exhibits in the remaining space. The new facility will also have a shop, cafe, offices, storage space, and a loading dock, in addition to a multipurpose room for talks, presentations, and performances.

    As the final plans began to take shape, the emphasis on the artists of eastern Long Island began to radiate as far west as Setauket, with William Sidney Mount, and as far east as Montauk, with Andy Warhol and others. The first installation in the new building will address the direct relationship between artists and the region’s landscape as well as how other artists took a less literal path from inspiration to result.

    It will begin with a celebration of the area’s living artists, showing work from the 1970s to the present. They will include process artists, such as Lynda Benglis, Mary Heilmann, Malcolm Morley, Alan Shields, Keith Sonnier, and Joe Zucker, and figurative artists, such as Ross Bleckner, April Gornik, and Donald Sultan. Straddling both is Chuck Close, whose process is central to his art-making although the end result is a facial likeness.

    The museum will then bring the focus back to the landscape with a gallery of works by William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, John Frederick Twachtman, and later works by Jane Freilicher, Sheridan Lord, and Jane Wilson.

    Chase will also receive his own gallery of portraits and other

paint-

ings along with photographs from the museum’s archives. Fairfield Porter will also be allotted his own space. A resolute figurist, Porter exemplified the duality of artistic inspiration from the South Fork’s art community and its landscape.  

    “Esteban Vicente: Portrait of the Artist” will focus on the artist’s studio practice and the circle of artists from whom he drew influences and friendships. Similarly, the exhibit “In the Company of Friends” will draw upon the artists of the 1950s and ’60s, who reacted to the primacy of Abstract Expressionism in unusual ways. These artists will include Dan Flavin, Roy Lichtenstein, Alfonso Ossorio, Larry Rivers, and Leon Polk Smith.

    Interior galleries that are not directly lit by the sun will display works on paper and, in the inaugural show, photographs of many East End artists at work.

 The Bird Is the Word

   The seventh annual Artists Birdhouse Auction to benefit the Coalition for Women’s Cancer at Southampton Hospital will be held on Saturday from 5:30 to 8 p.m. at 4 North Main Gallery in Southampton.

    More than 60 artists have designed birdhouses to be auctioned to raise money for the coalition’s cancer-patient support programs. The honorary chairwomen this year are Renee Zellweger, Betsey Johnson, and Karyn Mannix. Some of the birdhouses will be auctioned silently, others will be in a live auction.

    Among the artists taking part are Mary Abbott, David Salle, Stephanie Brody Lederman, Eric Ernst, Preston Phillips, and even Suffolk County Legislator Jay Schneiderman.

    This year there will also be “bird themed” photographs and paintings for sale. Portions of the sales will benefit the coalition as well.

    Ms. Mannix started the birdhouse auction, which has become one of the major cancer fund-raising events on the East End, after she survived breast cancer. The mission of the coalition is to create and sustain a supportive network for women affected by breast and gynecologic cancers in the Towns of East Hampton, Southampton, and Shelter Island.

    Tickets to the event are $25. All birdhouses will be on view at www. karynmannixcontemporary.com. Absentee bids may be placed by e-mailing [email protected] or calling 329-2811.

“From the Yards”

    Harper’s Books on Newtown Lane in East Hampton will present “Peter Spaans: New York from the Yards,” an exhibit of black-and-white photographs shot in and around the city’s subway yards in the mid-1980s. This is the first time the photographs have been on view publicly, although they were published in a small edition in the Netherlands.

    The images, including abandoned buildings and graffiti-covered subway cars, capture New York in a state of decay and are said to generate an air of unease. Harper’s Books will offer several copies of the original edition and a new limited edition.

    The exhibit will open Saturday with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. with Mr. Spaans in attendance. It will close on Jan. 1.

Carpentier and Howell

    The Pamela Williams Gallery in Amagansett will open an exhibit of paintings by Ralph Carpentier and Elwood Howell on Saturday.

    The artists’ East End landscapes are similar in subject but different in style. Mr. Carpentier’s familiar views of fields, farms, bays, and back roads come from decades of exploration of those landscapes and an affinity with Dutch marine painters and the Hudson River School. With a focus on the light, Mr. Carptentier, who lives in Springs, chronicles a disappearing way of life.    

    The abstracted works by Mr. Howell convey a different mood and place. He uses transparent glazes and multiple planes to “leave a tonal field that makes up most of the canvas,” according to Ms. Williams. He then adds floating shapes, letters and numbers, drips and spatters, to erect a symbolic framework drawn up to the high horizon line with a sliver of landscape resting on top. This style allows him to be literal in some ways while portraying an idiosyncratic view of the world.

    The exhibit will be on view through Nov. 13.

Fabric Sale at LongHouse

    Jack Lenor Larsen will hold a fabric sale on Saturday at the LongHouse Reserve on Hand’s Creek Road in East Hampton from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Hundreds of fabrics from all over the world will be available in the largest inventory ever donated to this event. Many large bolts are described as suitable for covering all types of furniture, while light-weight fabrics for curtains, duvet covers, and pillows will also be sold.

    Prices range from $20 to $40 a yard. According to a press release from LongHouse, the fabrics are usually  available only to the trade and typically sell for more than $100 a yard. All fabrics have been donated by Cowtan and Tout/ Larsen and will benefit the reserve’s public programs.

    For those who cannot make the sale, private appointments can be arranged through Wendy Van Deusen at LongHouse.

“On Loop” at Halsey McKay

    The Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton will show Arielle Falk’s video installation “On Loop” beginning Saturday with a reception from 6 to 9 p.m.

    According to the gallery, the installation is inspired by a childhood memory reinterpreted through the lens of Jacques Lacan’s concept of “objet petit a,” defined by Lacan as “any object that sets desire in motion.” Yet, it is also an object that can never be obtained.

    For Ms. Falk, it is the idea of chasing as an end in itself, as in a childhood game she recalled playing in which she chased a friend around a tree. The game to her is a “perfect metaphor for the fact that we, as humans, go through our lives searching for a chimerical something (objet petit a) and are forever wrapped up in endless loops of desire.”

     There are two videos in the installation. One recaptures the spirit of the chase game and the other shows the artist capturing the images for the first video, circling the tree over and over again.

    Ms. Falk was born in Washington, D.C., and now lives in Brooklyn. She has had a performance piece in Union Square in Manhattan and has shown her work internationally.

Odds & Ends

    Audrey Flack will play the banjo with the History of Art Band in Cooper Square in New York City on Tuesday, along with Watler Valta Us and others at 2 p.m. . . . Lynn Matsuoka will document a British actor during rehearsals for a sold-out London show in October. She is selling prints in support of this project at Kickstarter.com. . . . Molly Weiss, who has organized a number of exhibits on the South Fork, has been named director of Gallery 151 in Chelsea. A new show of John Platt’s work will open there on Oct. 20. . . . Michelle Murphy Strada’s work is included in the “American Realism” show at Gerald Peters Gallery in Santa Fe, N.M. through Nov. 12. . . . Photographers East will meet Monday at 7 p.m. at the Bridgehampton National Bank community room in Bridgehampton with a group discussion of photography and uses of Photoshop. The public is welcome.

    “American Portraits,” the latest in a series of shows from the Parrish Art Museum’s permanent collection, will open to the public on Sunday.

    The exhibit will spotlight tradition and innovation in  about 75 portraits, dating from as early as 1833, with a William Sidney Mount painting of Mrs. Manice, an American dignitary. Mount was based in Setauket and was part of the Hudson River School.

    There are more examples from the Parrish’s stable of artists, including William Merritt Chase, Fairfield Porter, Larry Rivers, and Chuck Close. But there are others who are not household names or typically associated with the museum, such as Joe Fig, James McNeill Whistler, Tina Barney, and Mary Ellen Mark.

    Alicia Longwell, the museum’s chief curator of art and education, organized the exhibit. According to the museum, the assembled works will “show how a diverse array of artists have addressed the themes and concepts of portraiture in a variety of media, including painting, drawing, and photography.” The exhibit will also examine the idea that every portrait reveals as much about the artist as the sitter.

    The exhibit will remain on view through Nov. 27. The day before it opens, a program for which reservations will be required, will include a screening of “Inside the Museum: American Portraits,” a video tour of the museum’s storage facilities led by Ms. Longwell. In addition, she will discuss the work in the exhibit with some of the artists. A reception will follow.

    Also on Sunday, the museum will present “Esmeralda,” a performance by the Bolshoi Ballet based on Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” at 2 p.m. This is the full production, which is typically seen only in excerpts.

    This is an encore presentation of a performance telecast live from Moscow on Sunday. The running time is approximately 200 minutes, including two intermissions.

    Tickets are $15, or $12 for Parrish members, and can be purchased online at parrishart.org or at the door.

    Ellen Feldman’s “Next to Love” is an appealing and swiftly moving historical novel. The book leaves its mark through careful attention to detail along with a keen tracking of the emotional current that runs through the lives of the characters during and in the wake of World War II.

“Next to Love”

Ellen Feldman

Spiegel & Grau, $25

    The story emerges chronologically, following three women — Babe, Grace, and Millie — from December of 1941 through to August of 1964. Three friends from the same small town, they send their men off to the war, each coping with different circumstances. Babe marries just before her husband ships out; Grace is left with a young child at home; Millie is pregnant, to give birth to a son her husband will never make it home to see.

    So too, they cope with different interior spaces, different senses of self, different outlooks that at least in part determine the tone of their experiences of the war and of the losses associated with it.

    Babe is a smart go-getter who is frustrated by the social constraints of being a woman and aware of the social realities of coming from the wrong side of the tracks in the small world of a small town. Her husband returns from the war physically wounded and psychologically deeply scarred. Grace is a tightly wound beauty who cracks under the pressure of holding it all together yet recovers and holds it together still. She loses her husband — her protector, her life — in the war and struggles mightily to find a place of comfort in the world. Millie is a sweetheart who lives in the shadow of her parents’ untimely deaths but retains an attitude toward life that is at once pragmatic and optimistic. Her husband dies in the war as well, but she quickly remarries and moves forward in a new relationship.

    The sections of the book are divided to focus alternately on Babe, Grace, and Millie so that the life issues and events of each woman in a given chunk of time are compared and contrasted with those of the others. These women are friends and fellow travelers; their lives are intermingled. But they approach their challenges differently, carry their burdens ever so differently. They share and do not share experience. They share and do not share perspective.

    Sketched out over the course of 20-odd years, the book is a sum of scenes artfully sewn together to form the landscape of how these three women fare as the wives of soldiers, then in the long aftermath of the war, and then in the territory beyond.

    Societal trends and social issues of the period, especially those facing women, are tracked through the lens of the three main characters’ lives. For example, Babe goes to work during the war but must leave her job to give it over to a man when the soldiers come home. She struggles to find meaning as a homemaker and eventually finds fulfillment working in the civil rights movement.

    Also mapping out the novel are the themes of love, sex, and loss. Ms. Feldman carries these themes along in the sweep of a broad historical sketch, and at times, moving as it does so quickly through time, the book feels a bit as if it’s trotting out examples. Yet Ms. Feldman more often manages to dwell in specificity, exploring love, sex, and loss in their deep organic relationships to her characters’ experiences.

    Taking Babe again as an example, the scene of her first sexual encounter with her husband-to-be is tied to the impending loss of his departure for war, and later, when he returns, their sex life is warped by his loss of the embracing of life, a wage of his depleting experience in the war. Ms. Feldman’s line into Babe’s emotional connection to the surfacing and resurfacing of themes gives the novel an infusion of life.

    Even within the demands of reaching and well-researched historical fiction, Ms. Feldman writes with insight into the feelings and struggles of her characters. As a work of faithfully wrought historical fiction, “Next to Love” feels accurate. As a novel chronicling love, loss, and the passage of time, it feels real.

—

    Ellen Feldman’s previous books include, most recently, “Scottsboro.” She has a house in East Hampton.

    Evan Harris is the author of “The Quit.” She lives in East Hampton with her husband and two sons.