Tivoli at Home gives cinephiles the chance to enjoy carefully curated films

It’s been a year of dramatic ups and downs worthy of a Hollywood thriller for the Tivoli, Kansas City’s art house cinema. To the dismay of the city’s film lovers, it closed its longtime Westport location in April 2019, but reopened to great jubilation in October 2019 in the Atkins Auditorium at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

But after several months of packed houses, the physical theater is once again closed, this time because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But you can’t keep the Tivoli down.

The Nelson-Atkins recently launched Tivoli at Home, an endeavor taking advantage of the latest technology to bring the art house experience to quarantined cinephiles during the pandemic. From the comfort of their own homes, patrons can watch a specially curated selection of current films, not available on other streaming services.

Jerry Harrington, who has run the Tivoli for 37 years, is curating the films. Harrington’s depth of knowledge and refined taste made the Tivoli one of the most respected art house theaters in the nation. He’s now combining those decades of experience with streaming technology to help the Tivoli’s many fans get through these trying times.

“The programming is similar to what we’ve always done at the Tivoli,” Harrington said. ”It’s a combination of foreign films and documentaries and oddball movies. They’re made available to us from certain distributors. We’re not talking Sony or Disney, we’re talking small, nobody’s-ever-heard-of distributors. They’re films that are more specialized and need more nuanced handling to get to the market.”

Tivoli at Home is one more example of how The Nelson-Atkins Museum, which has been closed since March 14, has been trying to make its content accessible during the pandemic, according to Julián Zugazagoitia, CEO and director of the museum.

“It’s been amazing to work with Jerry because he also started saying how he could do that and what films he could recommend,” Zugazagoitia said. “Jerry has negotiated with some distributors the ability to showcase first release movies, so now our viewers can access fresh and new releases and content. We will continue to have more options for how people can see and access art than ever before.”

Patrons can go The Nelson-Atkins website and sign up with a credit card number and then rent one of these films for 48 hours. Harrington says the average cost of the rental is $10 to $12 dollars. Half of the rental goes to the distributor and the other half goes to The Nelson-Atkins.

“If I have a choice of watching something on Netflix or the Tivoli, I’m going with the Tivoli so I can support The Nelson,” said Mark O’Connell, a patron who’s been using Tivoli at Home since it was started a month ago. “Supporting The Nelson is very important to me.”

O’Connell, a retired businessman who now owns vineyards in France, is a longtime resident of Kansas City who has been going to the Tivoli with his wife since the early 1980s. While Tivoli at Home is not quite the same experience as watching movies in a theater, he says he’s thrilled he’s still able to get his Tivoli fix during the pandemic.

“I’m happy to see it’s now moved online because in the normal course of my life, I’d be going to the Tivoli at the Nelson once a week or so,” he said. “But now I’m renting some great films. I saw ‘Corpus Christi,’ which is a Polish film that was nominated for an Academy Award and is just terrific, and ‘Once Were Brothers,’ a new documentary about The Band. I segued from that into ‘The Whistlers,’ which is a Romanian film that’s a little bit of a modern film noir thriller.”

O’Connell says this rarefied diversity is what makes the Tivoli so special.

“We get bombarded with all of these choices on Netflix and Amazon and HBO, and it’s hard to know what we should watch,” he said. “What I’ve found over the years is that Jerry is really astute at being able to engage a wide audience because he doesn’t just stick to one theme. He gives people choices. From my point of view, there’s always something I have an interest in.”

When the Tivoli moved to The Nelson-Atkins, one new feature became an instant hit. Tivoli Talk allowed patrons to gather in the the museum’s Rozzelle Court after watching a film to discuss what they had just seen. Harrington says he’s hoping to make Tivoli Talk an online experience as well.

“We’re working on having a zoom session for our patrons,” Harrington said. “We can’t all screen the movie at the same time, but we can designate a certain time we all get together and talk about the movie and people could type in questions for the filmmaker. The Nelson has a department that is working on it. We have to work out the kinks before we make it available to the public.”

Harrington says he has a line-up of coming attractions that typify what makes the Tivoli unique.

“There’s one I really want to recommend called ‘Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint,’” he said. “It’s basically revising art history because Klint was the first fully abstract artist before Kandinsky and Mondrian. ‘Mr. Jones’ is a fictional film about an English journalist who was the first Westerner to expose the famine in the Ukraine during the Stalin years. We also have three movies that were directed by the Hungarian filmmaker Istvan Szabo in the 80s. And the latest Ken Loach film, ‘Sorry I Missed You,’ his dramatization of how the gig economy is exploiting lower middle class workers. Ken Loach always takes a topical topic and turns it into a heartfelt drama sympathetic to the exploited masses.”

Zugazagoitia says that he is looking forward to the day, when patrons will once again be able to visit the Nelson-Atkins and watch movies at the Tivoli, but he says the museum is putting safety first.

“I don’t have an exact date when we will reopen because everyone is seeing how things evolve,” Zugazagoitia said. “We want to be extra cautious in not opening too soon. To whatever the city and the officials tell us, we will add a next layer of cautiousness.”

Until that reopening, Zugazagoitia encourages the city to enjoy the Nelson-Atkins large, beautiful lawn, which is still open to the public and to take advantage of the museum’s ever burgeoning online options, like Tivoli at Home.

“I think a silver lining in this situation is that people are getting more comfortable with all of this technology,” Zugazagoitia said. “I think it could be a new model that will survive past this immediate moment.”

Harrington says that while new online technologies will continue after the pandemic has passed, he says they are only a stop-gap measure for the kind of moviegoing experience the Tivoli has provided Kansas City for almost 40 years.

“I predict there will be a huge influx of people going to the movie theater when this is all over,” he said. “I think people have realized there’s something wonderful about seeing a movie on the big screen in a room full of like-minded people. Especially at a place like the Atkins Auditorium, where you don’t get a lot of talkers and texters. It’s a shared experience that you can’t get watching at home.”

For more information, visit https://nelson-atkins.org/tivoli.

Aram Demirjian wins conducting award

Aram Demirjian, who served as associate conductor of the Kansas City Symphony Orchestra from 2012-2016, has received the 2020 Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award.

The 33-year-old conductor, who is currently the music director for the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, will receive a grant of $30,000 dollars to be used for “professional development opportunities.”

Holding joint bachelor degrees in music and government from Harvard and a master’s in conducting from the New England Conservatory of Music, Demirjian is considered one of the most promising and innovative conductors of his generation.

You can reach Patrick Neas at patrickneas@kcartsbeat.com and follow his Facebook page, KC Arts Beat, at www.facebook.com/kcartsbeat.