“If you’re a filmmaker today you have to accept that people are going to watch your work on a laptop while they’re checking their email,” said Academy Award-nominated director Sam Green before Thursday night’s sold-out opening of his new “live documentary,” Utopia in Four Movements, at The Kitchen in Chelsea. ”I’m still very much attached to the magic of cinema, so part of making a live film is that people will have to come see it.”

So what’s it like to watch a live documentary? Kind of like watching a lecture, but with a full band and the prettiest PowerPoint presentation you’ve ever seen. On the screen, Green’s footage traced the history of twentieth-century Utopian dreams: Mao’s socialism, the constructed international language Esperanto, and the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens, during which participants buried a time capsule to dig up in 5,000 years. “It’s so weird because most time capsules are buried for like a hundred years. It just show’s how hopeful New Yorkers were about the future then.” Green, who is based in San Francisco, narrated the film while moody Brooklyn “porch-techno” band The Quavers, along with former Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty, performed the soundtrack.

Green says there’s a “small wave” of artists taking on the live format today. There’s the filmmaker Brent Green, who screens his films with a live band, sound effects and narration. And there’s San Francisco’s Pop Up Magazine, a popular live magazine-cum-variety show. “I believe people are hungry for live things,” he said. “Plus, sitting in your apartment watching a documentary about Utopia’s just kind of sad.”

Sam Green’s upcoming documentary about Esperanto will be released early next year. The Quavers will play on October 30 at Union Docs.

More than a hundred viewers crowded cross-legged on the floor of the 303 Gallery’s 21st Street space last night to watch live bands improvise a soundtrack to Doug Aitken’s latest film-based installation, “Migration.” One after another, three acts, White Rainbow, Lichens and Arp, accompanied the three billboard screens displaying Aitken’s western imagery — buffalo, train yards, roadside motels — that make up the first installment of his new three-part series “Empire.”

The music cycled between atmospheric melodies, nature sounds, and crashing, turbulent noise. At one point, an owl stared out from its perch on a motel room bed, and as feathers floated down around it, a keyboardist tapped out soft, gentle notes, mimicking a xylophone. But then the dull feedback grew louder, a bass thundered out low rhythms, and a caw cut through the growing cacophony — sending listeners into the heart of an angry flock of birds within seconds.

The images, by contrast, are eerily still. A buffalo stares blankly at a window, an owl pads around a generic motel room, the animals’ disorientation as palpable as Americans’ own mysterious migrations through nostalgic landscapes that can seem both distant and familiar.

The live music was a one-time thing, but the projections and an accompanying watercolor series are on view at the 303 Gallery’s 22nd St. space through November 1.

Image courtesy 303 Gallery.

Sometime during the next few weeks, those in France should make a trip out to Granville, the seaside town where Christian Dior once lived in a big pink house on a cliff. His home has since been transformed into the Musée Christian Dior, and the current exhibition, “Dandysmes: 1808-2008” displays silk cravats, David Bowie’s smoking jacket, portraits of dandies on loan from European museums, old manuscripts — like Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s famous dandy manifesto — and dozens of other artifacts created or owned by dandies.

The most interesting aspect of the exhibit is that it goes beyond the historical, making attempts to define “dandyism” today. Dandy purists might argue that metrosexuals, fashion extremists and women can never be dandies, but Vincent Leret, one of the show’s co-curators, said that the dandy’s raison d’être is simply “to be different, proud, brilliant, creative, desperate, with a strong attitude.”

The show displays images of Justin Timberlake, John Galliano’s candy-colored couture, and a photograph of Gisele Bündchen walking the runway in a 1940s-style Dior “Bar” suit for a 2007 couture show. Of course, for the more traditional, literary-minded viewer, there’s plenty of Proust, Wilde and Baudelaire.