Documents on Art & Cinema

2012-01-24T12:01:00.000-08:00

I'd been meaning to keep up with more regular blogging, but Christmas came and then various health issues, and, voila, more than a month passed. And a lot has happened. Today (Tuesday, 24 january) there was the announcement of the Academy Award nominations. Yesterday was Chinese New Year; it was also the night when Turner Classic Movies devoted the whole night to Max Ophuls. Of course, i've seen all the films shown, but in some cases ("The Reckless Moment") not in a while. I've been catching up with movies i missed during the year, and every so often, a movie will be on TV (Showtime or HBO) that i missed on release. One example (which i watched on Sunday) was "Lebanon, Pa." I've been to press screenings for the Dance On Camera series that will be at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; i've been to press screenings at Film Forum.

So there have been a lot of films seen, and i want to start to write about them. For instance: i'm really fascinated by what people are doing in terms of what used to be called "dance films". Obviously, this was occasioned by seeing Wim Wenders' "Pina", which i thought was one of the most inventive dance films i've ever seen. And i've seen a lot. And then i saw Frederick Wiseman's "Crazy Horse". Having also seen his earlier "Ballet" (about American Ballet Theater) and "La Danse" (about the Paris Opera Ballet), it was really instructive to see how his style has evolved (and it has): the new digital technology has allowed for greater flexibility and a greater visual freedom, and so the focus is different, because "Crazy Horse" seems slicker and less gritty, less "real" than "Ballet".

I'm trying to remember everything i've seen in the past month, and it's a lot. It's even something like Renoir's "Diary of a Chambermaid" which was on TCM last week: i haven't seen that film in about a decade, and it was fun to see it again. The thing about Renoir is that there is this reputation as a naturalistic, realistic director, which isn't true: throughout his career, there are always those films which are extravagantly artificial, highly theatrical, and wildly stylized. This can be seen in "Nana", in "La Chienne", in "The Golden Coach", "French Can-Can", "Elena et les Hommes", and it's certainly true in "Diary of a Chambermaid". Renoir allows everyone to go beserk in their acting, and it's funny.

More and more, i find there are always movies to get passionate about, and that makes me happy.

2011-12-17T12:03:00.000-08:00

Once again, it's been a while since i've posted, and i have been catching up on movies. I've submitted my lists for the annual Village Voice/LA Weekly and IndieWire polls; as usual (and this time, not really by design) i only mention any particular film once, which means that if i decided to list "Martha Marcy May Marlene" for the performance by Elizabeth Olsen (which i did), then i chose some other film for the Best First Feature category (this year, "Circumstance"). But it was such a good year for movies! Of course, i'm only going on films released in 2011, and i keep finding more films which i forgot i saw which were released this year. For the record, my Top Ten Films of 2011 were: 1) "A Brighter Summer Day"; 2) "To Die Like a Man"; 3) "The Mysteries of Lisbon"; 4) "Film Socialisme"; 5) "Nostalgia For the Light"; 6) "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives"; 7) "A Dangerous Method"; 8) "Putty Hill"; 9) "Le Quattro Volte"; 10) "The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975". My choice for Best Director was Cristi Puiu for "Aurora" which i felt was very tense and suspenseful for its almost three-hour running time, so that was an impressive achievement. But i also thought that Nicolas Winding Refn's direction was spectacular in "Drive". There were just a lot of good movies. In fact, it might be better to say there were a lot of great movies.

I've also been catching up with movies on HBO and Showtime, things like "The Adjustment Bureau" and even the Harry Potter series, including "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1". (I have to say, about the Harry Potter series, it is a bit of a slog, but there's always somebody that turns up, some eminence or near-eminence in the British acting pantheon, so there's always something to look forward to, and some of the effects are delightful. The pacing is a little stolid, i keep wishing somebody among the various directors would be a little less reverential, but i was surprised at how enjoyable i found the whole series.)

The VV/LA Weekly poll had the category "Breakthrough of the Year": this seemed like the obvious catgeory for Jessica Chastain, who wound up in seven movies which were released or completed in 2011: "The Tree of Life", "The Help", "The Debt", "Take Shelter", "Texas Killing Fields", "Coriolanus" and "Wilde Salome" (this was her first movie, another Al Pacino documentary about a classic play, but the editing is supposed to be completed and the film awaits release). But other breakthroughs (the category is supposed to include anything that could be considered a breakthrough) for me would include BAM CinemaFest, which i feel has finally come into its own as a film festival; Michael Fassbender with four movies ("Jane Eyre", "X Men: First Class", "A Dangerous Method" and "Shame"); and the fact that many independent filmmakers (including Todd Haynes, and Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini) were able to find a way to accommodate their work to the demands of cable TV ("Mildred Pierce" and "Cinema Verite", both for HBO), as well as many documentary filmmakers who had their works on cable TV with movies like "Bobby Fisher Against the World" and "Borg/McEnroe: Fire and Ice". Martin Scorsese had two documentaries this year which were on HBO: "Public Speaking" (his portrait of Fran Lebowitz) and "George Harrison: Living In the Material World". If independent filmmakers were trying to figure out ways of working with HBO or Showtime, several Hollywood veterans were involved in new network TV series: Jonathan Demme as executive producer and sometimes director of "A Gifted Man", and Philip Noyce as executive producer and sometimes director of "Revenge". And this was also a year when so many people came into their own: Ryan Gosling has been doing excellent work for a decade, mostly in independent films (he had a brief fling with Hollywood when he did "Murder By Numbers" and "The Notebook", but he retreated from that, fast, and really sought out independent projects which excited him) but this year, he made two movies which certified him as a star: "Drive" and "Crazy Stupid Love". Brad Pitt proved, with two movies ("The Tree of Life" and "Moneyball"), what a fine actor he has become. Viola Davis found herself finally receiving major recognition for "The Help" (the acclaim for her work in "Doubt" a few years back might have brought her that recognition if the film had been a box office success, which it wasn't). And (aside from "Circumstance") there were quite a few amazing first features this year: "Martha Marcy May Marlene", "Margin Call", "Pariah", "Take Shelter" and "In the Family", the last a self-distributed film by Patrick Wang which would have been the type of film i would have championed if i was still involved in programming on the festival circuit.

So all in all, an amazing year. It was a year when film was in transition: new methods of filmmaking, new modes of presentation and exhibition, new formats. But movies were still getting made, and so many movies were finally finding their way to audiences. And i haven't even gotten into everything that happened this year, including the developments in 3D filmmaking: Werner Herzog (with "Cave of Forgotten Dreams"), Wim Wenders (with "Pina") and Martin Scorsese (with "Hugo") finally used 3D as an integral part of their artistic vision, rather than just as a gimmicky adjunct, and the results were breathtaking. In fact, "Pina" was my choice for Documentary of the year, and i have to say why: i detested Pina Bausch's work, i went to three of her concerts when her company was first brought to the US (at the Brooklyn Academy of Music), and all three times, i had to walk out. The incessant repetition, the unrelieved po-faced angst (i remember Arlene Croce's description of Pina Bausch as "an entrepeneuse of despair"; i love that, "entrepeneuse" like "poetess"), the unmodulated dynamics: enough! Yet the film was so skillful in presenting snippets of the works so that the dances seemed palatable, and the 3D cinematography was so tactile and sensual, the entire film was transporting. The damned movie made me appreciate Pina Bausch in a way i hadn't before. And that's quite an accomplishment! So for that reason, i had to say "Pina" was a revelatory documentary, as well as a major advance in the problem of putting dance on film.

But there's so much more. Of course, the year was swamped by comic-book franchise movies, but if you didn't go to any of them (and i didn't), there were always good movies to see.

2011-11-22T08:17:00.001-08:00

My goodness, i have been playing catch-up with the New York Film Festival, and i have to say that, so far, it's been quite a solid festival! But this year was one of the most fraught years at the Film Festival: several of the press screenings were full, and i got shut out of several screenings. But among the films that i didn't get to, i have now seen "The Descendants" and "Pina" and "Shame"; all proved to be intriguing, and exceptional in their own ways.

BAM has been having a puppet film festival, sponsored by the Jim Henson Foundation as a way to announce the new Muppet movie; they press screened John Turturro's "Rehearsal for a Sicilian Tragedy", another panel in his essays on Italian culture, this one centering on the Sicilian marionette theater. The Walter Reade Theater is having an Edward Yang retrospective, and they press screened "A Brighter Summer Day" which i hadn't seen since 1997. BAM will also be having a program of recent Portuguese films (they press screened "The Baron" from 2011, one of the most tactile black-and-white films i've seen, the incredible depth of the cinematography was like 3D without the glasses); Walter Reade will be having the Spanish Cinema Now series (they press screened "Extraterrestrials" and "Every Song Is About Me", the former a whimsical low-tech sci-fi romance, the latter an attempted whimsical romantic comedy, attempted whimsy is actually another way of saying dud).

There's a lot more to write, but the thing that's holding all this up is more medical tests, more doctors. Oh, well. But tonight i should have time to reflect on the movies i've seen, and some of the books i've been reading (i decided to take the plunge and read a bunch of movie-related memoirs, including Michael Lindsay-Hogg's "Luck and Circumstance", Piper Laurie's "Learning to Live Out Loud", James Wolcott's "Lucking Out"; next up will be Diane Keaton's "Then Again".)

2011-10-28T11:22:00.000-07:00

Once again, it's been more than a month, and an eventful month it has been. Among other events: the New York Film Festival came and went, and i tried to make it to as many press screenings as i could, which wasn't easy since i was overwhelmed with more medical tests and procedures, and on three occasions i was shut out of the screenings. But this year seemed to be quite a solid festival, i didn't see anything that i felt was really deficient.

I shall be writing on a number of the films i did see in a little while, but i wanted to make a few comments.

I went to the opening for Jonas Mekas's photo show at Agnes b.'s store in Soho; Jonas seems to be in fine shape, and his children Oona and Sebastian were there, which was amusing, since i hadn't seen Sebastian since he was a child! But Jonas and i remarked on how sad the summer had been, with the deaths of many friends/associates/compatriots in the avantgarde cinema. David Stone, Jonas's brother Adolfas, Robert Breer, Jordan Belson, and George Landow. George Landow's death was particularly difficult to hear about, because he had become almost a recluse, and, though it was easy to keep track of his activities (any new film of his was sure to show up at events like the Views from the Avant-Garde of the New York Film Festival), to keep track of him was not as easy. I wasn't the only friend who lost track of George (who renamed himself Owen Land some time in the late 1980s); after he left his teaching position at the Art Institute of Chicago, he started on a very peripatetic existence. I knew that he had been ill in the last few years, but, aside from that, i didn't know much else. But, still, it was a shock to find out about George's death (he died on June 8, 2011). P. Adams Sitney has a very touching essay on "Owen Land" in the November 2011 issue of Artforum; it was quite illuminating (for example, i didn't realize that George and P. Adams had been friends since childhood, their families living as they did in the same apartment building in New Haven, Connecticut). That George had started his career as a teenager was something i knew; i met him at some point in 1970-71. This idea of teenagers in the avantgarde is crucial (i think) to understanding the explosion of the arts in New York City during the 1960s. But i lost touch with George in the mid-1980s, and so i had no idea of the difficulties of his life (various illnesses, etc.).

Yesterday, Larry and i went to the press preview for "Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties" at the Brooklyn Museum. We had anticipated it to be a show of the museum holdings of American art during the 1920s; instead, it turned out to be a remarkable and wide-ranging show with works drawn from an incredible array of institutions across the country, such as the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, the Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln, Nebraska, the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, and the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art. It's a wonderful show (curated by Teresa A. Carbone), which serves as a corrective to the simplistic narrative of abstraction-as-artistic evolution which is part of the master narrative of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum.

So a lot to think about....

2011-09-18T15:37:00.000-07:00

I'm a wreck; more medical tests on the way! However, i did take the time to do a few things in the last week or so, and saw a number of films.

The first press screening for the New York Film Festival happened on Friday, and turned out to be three films from the Nikkatsu Centennial sidebar. Having seen "The Woman With Red Hair" (one of the many "pink" films from Nikkatsu, and a rather notorious one), i decided to catch "Mud and Soldiers" from 1939, a rarity. And it turned out to be quite something: ferociously action-packed, with a grunt's eye view of combat that proved visceral. There were a few moments of propaganda, which made the film not the most comfortable experience, but the combat sequences were amazing and relentless. The director was Tomotaka Tasaka, and he certainly showed a flair for gritty action footage.

There are other things to talk about, such as the Heinz Emigholz films i saw (part of a series that the Goethe Institute and Anthology Film Archives will be holding), and the various movies i've watched on TV (i finally saw "127 Hours" when it showed on HBO; an impressive movie, but i don't know if i could have watched it in a theater, some of it is so anxiety-provoking). But (as the saying goes) more later.

2011-09-07T15:10:00.001-07:00

This time, it really has been more than a month, and the entire month of August was incredibly stressful. Some of the events: an earthquake hitting the East Coast of the United States (including New York City); Hurricane Irene also hitting the same area less than a week later; we're now in the midst of another rainy weather system which is causing more flooding. But if that wasn't bad enough....

I wrote about how isolated i feel in terms of going to press screenings; i realized that, since i got back to the US in August 2010, i have been isolated. Before i left for Berlin, my friend Christine was still working; now she's retired, and she's been keeping herself busy with traveling, also, since Steve is retired as well, she's spending her time with him. Debby's now working in Queens, at the Volker Orth Museum, one of the many little house-museums throughout the city; but, since she lives in Queens, that means that a lot of her time is spent close to home. But Debby and Christine have been my friends since high school: that's more than 40 years! And we used to do something (go to a concert, a movie, a museum) at least once a week. I don't think i've seen them more than twice since i've been back.

There's been a lot of bad news in the past few weeks. Today (September 7) brought the news that Jordan Belson and George Kuchar died. Last month, there were the deaths of Robert Breer and Raul Ruiz. With them, the idea of alternative cinema which had animated the most adventurous talents has become more chimerical. Closer to home, in terms of age, last week brought the news that Graham Leggat, who was the director of the San Francisco Film Society, and Jeanette Ingberman, who was the director of Exit Art, had died. (One note: in the obits on Graham Leggat that were published in IndieWire and in sf360, it was noted that his partner was Diana Chiawen Lee; i knew Graham when he was working at The Museum of Modern Art and then at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, before he moved to San Francisco to take the job at the SF Film Society, and i knew Diana when she was running the Asian-American International Film Festival, but they both moved out to San Francisco and they hooked up out there.)

The news that Jordan Belson died brings me to something that has bothered me in the past month: i was sent an advance copy of the Library of America's "The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael" edited by Sanford Schwartz. This reminded me that i hadn't gotten the Library of America's Manny Farber collection: "Farber On Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber" edited by Robert Polito. So i got it, and started reading... and found any number of errors and omissions. An example of the omissions: in the entire book (and that includes Polito's introductory essay and the chronology), there is no mention of Manny Farber's full name. (It's Emanuel Farber.) And here's a big example of mistakes which have never been corrected since the original review appeared in The Nation. The review is from October 11, 1952, and is about the Kinesis films from San Francisco: "The idea of most of the Kinesis group is to take something that is practically nothing (thick swirls of lavalike paint, etc.), make it march, expand and fade, relate it to Mozart or Dizzy Gillespie, and hope that it takes wing like music. My own feeling is that if you put as much music into films as do Gordon Belson and Hy Hirsh, you won't have a picture so much as a repetitious exercise in rhythm. Belson's new animations give the impression of a Jackson Pollock kaleidoscope set in motion to mamba sounds; the over-all effect is morbid and thick. Hy Hirsh puts on a stunning display of tricky neon-colored evolutions, but her film - Arp-like ovals deployed across the screen like a formation of airplanes through three symphonic movements - almost sent me to sleep." Ok, two big mistakes: there was no San Francisco Kinesis filmmaker named Gordon Belson, it's Jordan Belson, and Hy Hirsh was a man, not a woman (Storm De Hirsch, who was in New York City and making films at that time, was a woman). For Manny, these little details were unimportant (he was too much of a man to worry about petty mistakes), but somebody should care enough to make the corrections.

But i find that, more and more, corrections are never made, and mistakes can go on forever! And "Farber On Film" is a riot of such mistakes!

And, yes, it bothers me, but nobody seems to care. Everyone from Geoffrey O'Brien on down at Library of America is just so cavalier about these mistakes. Well, pardon me!

And i noted this attitude when i wrote about the death of Roberts Blossom: the New York Times chose to ignore Blossom's most important work as an artist, the fact that, as a multimedia (or intermedia) performance artist in New York City in the late 1950s-early 1960s, his work which mixed film and live performance influenced many people (Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, the Judson Dance Theater choreographers, Meredith Monk, Andy Warhol). And he gave up doing his own work in the mid-1960s, and devoted himself to acting and writing for the rest of his life. And he had a very considerable career as a character actor. But that doesn't mean that his contribution (which was very important) to the field of what is now called "Performance" should be overlooked.

But of course, it is overlooked, because people like Roselee Goldberg and Klaus Biesenbach have no interest in providing anything like an accurate historical overview. What they want is the hip, art world overview.

And the way this works: for example, Lucinda Childs is always grouped as part of the Rauschenberg contingent of the Judson Dance Theater, yet her early work (with its mixture of verbal text and task performance) was heavily influenced by James Waring (in whose company she danced), and, when she started to do her own choreography, she often worked with other people from James Waring's dance company, in particular, Arlene Rothlein and Freddie Herko. But for Lucinda Childs to be included in the current histories of the Judson Dance Theater, she must be included among "Rauschenberg's babies" (Shigeko Kubota's term) rather than as part of James Waring's company (a company which also included Aileen Passloff, Toby Armour, Rothlein, Herko, Yvonne Rainer, and David Gordon; since David Gordon only worked with James Waring, it's safe to say that David Gordon's work, which also involves verbal texts and task performance, was also influenced by Waring).

But James Waring was a "mere" choreographer, and Roberts Blossom was a "mere" actor, so their influence and importance (which were considerable) must be negated.

One last note: at the beginning of August, i went to my eye doctor (i hadn't gone since before i left for Berlin), but this appointment was a delay, i was supposed to go in July but i had jury duty! (And i was on a jury!) But because this was another appointment, i wanted to make sure that the referral was still valid. When i called my doctor, i found out that the referral was good for at least three months, and that my doctor was retiring! So i had to find another doctor. Well, i found another doctor, it was cleared by my insurance company, and i went to see him.

But he's a younger doctor, and he's part of a clinic, so he made appointments for me with a cardiologist and a urologist. And since then, i've had so many tests... yesterday was the last one, and i felt like Audrey Hepburn at the beginning of "Funny Face", where she exclaims, "I find myself being pillaged and plundered, well, I'll have no more of it!"

2011-07-28T19:41:00.000-07:00

It's been more than a month since i last posted, and yet it has been a very eventful month in terms of viewings and events. Yet i haven't (quite) felt the urge to write anything....

Part of that stems from the feeling of isolation. One example: when Anthology had press screenings for the series on Ken Jacobs' work in 3D, i went. It was actually spread over two days, because there was about six hours worth of material being screened. On the first day, two other people showed up; on the second day, i was the only person. But then, a few weeks later, J. Hoberman wrote about the series in The Village Voice, and there was a long article in Artforum by P. Adams Sitney about Ken Jacobs' work in 3D. I mean, how did they see all of these pieces? Why did i show up for the press screenings? I would have liked to have seen other people i know.

It's the feeling that there no longer exists that community of interest.

Another big example of this lack of community: last week, on July 13th, there were obits for Roberts Blossom. The obit that William Grimes wrote for The New York Times was really disgraceful. It talked about Roberts Blossom's work as a character actor, and his roles in movies such as "Home Alone" and "Escape From Alcatraz"... but it didn't even mention his role in Jonathan Demme's "Citizens Band" (a.k.a. "Handle With Care"). But that's not important: what was important was that The New York Times chose to ignore the fact that, as a "performance artist" (what originally had been called Happenings), Roberts Blossom was one of the most significant artists of the late 1950s-early 1960s, an artist who influenced many people (including Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Carolee Schneemann, Yvonne Rainer and Meredith Monk) through his work with his then-wife Beverly Schmidt. At least The Los Angeles Times obit mentioned his work in the early 1960s with his own company, FilmStage. It might not seem such a big deal, but Roberts Blossom (in the late 1950s) got the idea to use film as part of the theatrical event. And as far as i know, he was one of the first, if not the first. (Robert Whitman started using film in 1960-61, but i think Blossom beat him by about two years.) He got the idea because his wife had been a dancer with the Alwin Nikolai Dance Company, and Nikolai was noted for all the lighting effects. And Roberts Blossom got the idea: if you can use lighting effects (strobe lighting, etc.), why can't you use a projected moving image? And so he started conceiving of theater pieces where live action was combined with film.

Now, we're so used to multimedia stage events, but where would this be if not for Roberts Blossom? And this man died, and his contribution to culture is not acknowledged. It's ignored. And it's ignored because Roberts Blossom didn't become a big artist in the visual arts; when he and Beverly Schmidt divorced in 1966, she continued to dance, and he stopped doing his own performance work, and simply went back to acting. (It's because people like Roberts Blossom continue to be ignored that i take issue with people like Klaus Biesenbach and Roselee Goldberg; i didn't get to see his early work, but i did see some of the work from the mid-1960s, and i also heard about Roberts Blossom from my friends, like Carolee Schneemann, Yvonne Rainer, Meredith Monk, George Macuinas and Jonas Mekas; if i'm not mistaken, George and Jonas included Roberts Blossom in some of the Expanded Cinema events that they programmed in 1964-65.)

And so what i expected to happen, happened: Roberts Blossom died, and his significance as an artist has been erased from public record.

And this is happening more and more.

And if that isn't enough to make a person feel isolated, i don't know what else would.

2011-06-22T10:09:00.000-07:00

The last weeks have been incredibly volatile, yet i haven't really done anything. Yesterday stands as an example: we sat here waiting for the repairmen, one for the oven and the other for the dryer. We were told approximate times (for the oven, between 11 and 4, for the dryer, between 1 and 5), and we were also told that we would be informed when they were set to arrive (they would call us before they left the previous job). So, at 1:30, we got a call and the repairman for the oven was on his way (he arrived at 1:45) ; then we got a call from the repairman for the dryer, he arrived before 3. Now everything has been taken care of, but the anxiety was intense, because we had an appointment on Thursday for the repairs, but by 5 o'clock, no one showed up! So if no one showed up this time, we were really screwed.

There was an obit today in the New York Times for Thomas Armstrong, whose tenure at the Whitney brought about the current state of the museum, which had ripple effects which continue to this day. Armstrong allowed a team of (then) mostly young curators to try to create shows which were cutting-edge, up-to-the-minute, au courant. The Biennials, which had been rather stodgy, became the beacon for the new. And it affected the art world, so that the Whitney Independent Study Program became a launchingpad for so many careers, not just in the visual arts, but in other fields as well. (The filmmaker Elia Suleiman, as an example, spent time in the Whitney Independent Study Program.) Now, not just the Whitney, but MoMA P.S. 1, the New Museum, the Guggenheim, the Brooklyn Museum, even the modern wing of the Metropolitan Museum, struggle to be with-it, in-the-know. And that, for better or worse, is Thomas Armstrong's legacy. And all of us who deal in the arts have to deal with it.

Yesterday, there was an obit for A. Whitney Ellsworth (not to be confused with F. Whitney Ellsworth; F. Whitney was the comic book person who was involved in the Superman TV series); this was more personal. Whitney Ellsworth's eldest son is Barry Ellsworth, who is a friend. Whitney Ellsworth proved that you can always make a difference: he went from being an editor at The Atlantic to being the founding publisher of The New York Review of Books, and then, as the director of Amnesty International, he transformed the organization from a little shoestring operation into a real international force. But what i remember about Whitney Ellsworth was his enthusiasm; when Barry and i were involved with Apparatus, we'd have events and Barry's parents would show up (you would think it would have been awkward, since Sallie Bingham and Whitney were long divorced, but their parental pride in Barry overrode their differences) and Whitney would always be so intrigued by what we were doing, and what our plans were for Apparatus. So, aside from his public achievements, i remember Whitney Ellsworth as a father who was just so proud of his children.

This brings me to another story. While i was in Berlin, i really became addicted to Facebook; i've since weaned myself from that obsession, but FB was one way to connect myself to other people, and i had been very isolated ever since we moved to Brooklyn. The artworld really was a neighborhood, with so many of us living in downtown Manhattan. But by the end of the 1990s, there really was a dispersal. FB gave a false sense of reconnection. Two people that i really liked being in touch with have left FB: one person closed his account a while ago, and the other person just had his account closed (he posted a picture of himself in the nude). But every so often, i do come across someone that i haven't been in touch with for a long time. Sometimes, i do try to look up people, and the Internet has a lot of sites which list people. But a month ago, i put in a name, and came up with an obituary notice.

Turns out that this person, Ken, died in 2004; the last time i saw him would have been about 1994. I tried to be his friend, but he was very conflicted about his life. He had been working on Wall Street after getting a business degree from SUNY; but when i met him, he'd given up his job, and was working as a stripper at Show Palace. Coming out, for him, was something so shameful that he was throwing his life away. He was afraid to tell his family he was gay: he was the youngest of four brothers, and he thought his brothers would shun him. So he basically was doing it for them.

But though i was saddened to read the obit, it also made me feel better: it said that, when he died, he had a "life-partner", that he had gone back to school and gotten a degree (in nursing), that he had worked as a nurse and actually won an award for his work. And the obit mentioned his family, saying that they were with him when he died. So his brothers hadn't rejected him. So though i was sad to realize he was dead, i was glad to read that he had gotten his life together in the decade before his death.

I spent the entire weekend at home, and i'm starting to feel like a hermit here in Brooklyn. I wish i could rouse myself to do something, but most weekends i just like staying at home. But the coming weekend should be different.

2011-06-13T17:35:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, the impulse to write does get stymied; it's hard to work up much enthusiasm when the entire critical landscape seems to be in a state of decline (and this has been the topic of much discussion, as witness the panel that followed the annual AICA meeting). I've seen a lot of movies in the last two weeks: i have now seen 12 of the features that will be part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's CinemaFest, and, yes, there are trends that have emerged. I also saw a few other movies, such as Jacqueline Caux's documentary "Prism's Colors, Mechanics of Time"; i saw two documentaries on HBO, "Bobby Fischer Against the World" and "McEnroe/Borg: Fire & Ice". I also saw Errol Morris's "Tabloid" and John Turturro's "Passione". But it's been a lot and i need to try to process it all.

2011-06-09T04:35:00.000-07:00

So much seen in the past two weeks. The Brooklyn Academy of Music will be having its third annual CinemaFest; there were press screenings, and i've now seen twelve of the movies which will be screened. There's a lot to think about, and quite a few trends to discuss.

The Atlantic Avenue Artwalk 2011 was last weekend, and turned out to be a lot of fun, but it seemed more a crafts fair than any sort of art event.

There's a heat advisory out: the temperatures are expected to climb to almost 100 degrees. It's brutal out there.

Last week, there was an obituary for Adolfas Mekas in the New York Times. Of course, i had not seen Adolfas in years, but it was a shock to realize he was 85 years old! When i was working down at the old Anthology Film Archives at 80 Wooster Street, i shared the basement office with Pola Chappelle, Adolfas's wife: she was working on the preservation of Jerome Hill's films. If Adolfas was 85, that means Jonas should be 82.

But on Friday, i went to Anthology (now located at 2nd Street and 2nd Avenue) for the press screening of Jacqueline Caux's documentary "Prism's Colors, Mechanics of Time", and when i got out of the screening, i heard the sound of an infant running around; turned out that a young couple was in the lobby, there to help set up for some event that evening at Anthology, and they'd brought their baby with them. But the sound of children running around Anthology: that wasn't so uncommon when i was working there, because Pola would sometimes bring their son Sean, and Jonas would sometimes bring his daughter Oona. The documentary was itself nostalgic, in that it was a document of the music scene of the 1960s and beyond, with interviews from John Cage, LaMonte Young, Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Phil Glass, Meredith Monk.... in a funny way, the experience was alienating, because i was by myself, and Anthology wasn't the Anthology of my youth (when it started at the Public Theater and then moved to 80 Wooster Street) and yet the experience was one which was reminiscent of Anthology in the mid-1970s. And that included Jacqueline Caux's documentary.

2011-05-30T19:49:00.000-07:00

The Memorial Day weekend was relatively uneventful. I did go to two events: a press screening of Azazel Jacobs's new film "Terri" on Friday, and the program "Dancing Divas" at La Mama on Saturday. Today i spent the afternoon watching "Oprah Behind the Scenes" on the Oprah Winfrey Network.

Other events of last week: the annual meeting of AICA, plus a panel discussion on the crisis in art criticism on Monday; the press preview of the Cory Arcangel exhibition "Pro Tools" at the Whitney Museum on Wednesday; Susan Bee's opening at the AIR Gallery and Violeta Fiorino's opening at the de Castellane Gallery on Thursday; then "Terri" and "Dancing Divas".

Last week was a big television week, with the finales of "American Idol", "Dancing With the Stars", "The Biggest Loser", and "The Oprah Winfrey Show". So there's actually been a lot which people have been writing about.

This week there will be press screenings for BAMFest, and then the weekend there will be Artwalk on Atlantic Avenue. So there's a lot i have to write about, but right now, i'm watching "Sapphire" (part of the Basil Dearden's London Underground boxset), which i remember seeing when i was a child.

Two weeks ago, i had an odd experience; on TCM's James Stewart afternoon, i watched "The Spirit of St. Louis", and i was shocked to realize that the movie was in color! I'd seen the movie on television as a child, and i never really had the inclination to see it again, so i just figured it was in black-and-white.

The reason i bring that up is that i had a similar experience with "Sapphire" though i knew the film was in color, but i had seen it on television sometime in the early 1960s, and i never had the chance to see it again, so my one viewing had been in black-and-white, though i knew it had been made in color. ("Peeping Tom" was another film which was similar, though in that case, i saw the movie in a theater and it was in black-and-white; i would read later that the American distributor was afraid that the movie was too lurid in color, and released it in black-and-white, and that's how the film was shown throughout the 1960s in the US.)

So that's my experience of seeing movies in black-and-white (though they were in color).

2011-05-18T16:53:00.001-07:00

Good heavens it's now May 18, it's been two weeks. A lot has happened; in terms of popylar culture, there's the countdown to the end of the Oprah Winfrey Show. "Spiderman" has been rebooted, without Julie Taymor at the helm. The Cannes Film Festival is nearing another conclusion; reading a lot of the reports from the festival, it's hard to get a sense of what's actually been worthwhile. Malick's "The Tree of Life" has been greeted with the usual cacophony of boos and cheers (this seems to be standard at Cannes); there are new movies by the Dardennes (reactions mostly positive), Lynne Ramsay (reactions mixed), Lars Von Trier (though the comments seem to be about his obnoxious/offensive behavior at the press conference).

Some of the movies that have been around include the Kaneto Shindo retrospective at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (with what was the theatrical premiere engagement of "Children of Hiroshima", which surprised me, because that movie was shown at MoMA and at Japan Society over the years, so i just assumed that the movie had actually opened in the US; pardon me, my mistake), a number of movies at Film Forum, including "A Screaming Man" from Chad, "Tuesday, After Christmas" from Roumania, revivals of "Went the Day Well" and "The Makioka Sisters" and "La Dolce Vita".... another film which opened was "Octubre" from Peru. MoMA held a comprehensive retrospective of Dziga Vertov's work, which was exciting news: i remember looking at Vertov's films over the years, first when Anthology Film Archives opened, and over the years when MoMA got archival prints. MoMA used to have a show every couple of years where they'd show films which they acquired for their archives. "Man With a Movie Camera" is a film i've seen many times, but in the 1990s, when the Alloy Orchestra performed their new score accompanying the film, that seemed to create a whole new level of popularity.

The Brooklyn Academy also had a retrospective of Hal Ashby's films; one of the highlights was supposed to be the director's cut of "Looking to Get Out".

This week has been a very wet one, with rain on and off every day. There are people who claim that May 21 will be the day of reckoning, when the world will end according to prophecy; if i were the weather bureau, i wouldn't want a period of seven days and seven nights of rain, because that's just feeding into the doomsday fantasies of some people. In fact, one retired person has used his life savings to take out ads on the subways and buses, warning of the Apocalypse.

But i did go to the program put on by the Filmmakers Coop at Millennium, as part of the Festival of Ideas for the New City put on by The New Museum. It was a great little program, with work by Ken Jacobs, Oona Mekas, Jennifer Reeves and MM Serra, Katy Martin, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Peter Cramer, Lynne Sachs and Mark Street. That was also the night that Lady Gaga's Monster Ball special was on HBO, so i rushed home to see the end of that. But there were ads for weeks about the Festival of New Ideas; when i first saw them, i thought that the festival must have had something to do with Theater for the New City, but i was wrong again. Turns out it was just something thought up by The New Museum; there were a lot of gallery shows and panels and talks, and it actually did spark interest. There was a booklet with little entries on all the participating galleries, and those galleries did see a spike in attendance. But even in an art context, "experimental" film still isn't an easy sell, but the program was totally charming, a reminder of the great skill that so many of these filmmakers have.

I just watched "Nanny McPhee Returns", which played in Berlin, but i didn't see the point of seeing it then. It was enjoyable enough, one moment which really was touching was the farewell between Emma Thompson and Maggie Smith. It just has to do with Maggie Smith's face, which is not touched-up: the emotions coming from her face seem genuine because she seems so real.

2011-05-04T20:34:00.000-07:00

There's been so much happening, but on Sunday, when the announcement of Osama Bin Laden's death was made by the President, i felt a little like a Munchkin: ding, dong, the witch is dead. The celebratory tone that was all over the media by Monday morning was confounding. I understand it, but it's also rather alienating.

I've been seeing a lot of movies lately, all sorts. A sampling: "Anagraph Tom" (Ken Jacobs's 3D reworking of his "Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son"); Ichikawa's "The Makioka Sisters"; the Chinese epic "City of Life and Death"; two movies which never seemed to be released but were on HBO, "Neverwas" and "Method"; the PBS documentary "Stonewall Uprising"; "punk" videos from San Francisco. Two big events on HBO: Todd Haynes's miniseries of "Mildred Pierce" and the Berman-Pulcini "Cinema Verite". Also tried watching some of Neil Jordan's "The Borgias" on Showtime. All of this has provoked a lot of reactions on my part, but i'm still thrown by current events.

I've also been indulging in one of my obsessions: i've been working on my digital still collection for the last two months. Once i start one of these things, i go beserk and it's total tunnelvision. I just spend hours on it. When i started this blog, it was a very simple format, and there was no way to post pictures. Now you can, and friends of mine have done some really impressive visuals on their blogs, but i haven't really learned how to change my blog.

But maybe i'll start.... i have to say that Oprah Winfrey's show this afternoon (May 4) was really impressive: she had the 100-plus surviving Freedom Riders. It was really historic!

2011-04-16T09:29:00.000-07:00

It has been a while since i've blogged, and i have been seeing things. This week, for example, i went to three press screenings: the Scandinavian film "Limbo", the indie film "Earthwork" starring John Hawkes, and "The Arbor". "The Arbor" was one of the most intriguing films, and it is the longest example of strategies that i've seen in a number of works which have been characterized as "experimental". In "The Arbor", Clio Barnard (the writer-director) takes audio recordings of the family and friends of Andrea Dunbar, and then she has actors lip-synch to the recordings. Ok, i'll quote from the press release: "The film is based on the life and autobiographical writings of Yorkshire playwright Andrea Dunbar, whose work was produced at London's prestigious Royal Court Theatre, but who died of a brain hemorrhage at age 29 in 1990. Dunbar is best known to American audiences as the screenwriter of 'Rita, Sue and Bob too!' - the 1987 movie that took a darkly comedic approach to her hardscrabble life. 'The Arbor' revisits this material through an innovative technique known as vrebatim theater: actors lip-synching documentary recordings of the people they're playing. Dunbar's daughters update a family saga of alcoholism, drugs, prostitution, sexual abuse and violence. Rarely has the cyclical nature of poverty been so brilliantly and believably dramatized." So, right away, i'll say that the film is seamlessly done: the acting is so precise and you're not aware of the lip-synching. The idea of re-creating documentary material has been done a few times. Two examples that i can think of are Elizabeth Subrin's "Shulie" and Trent Harris's "The Beaver Trilogy" (which was recently shown at Anthology Film Archives). When i first saw "Shulie", i went in without knowing what the film was, and i found it a fascinating portrait of someone living in the late 1960s. But after i saw it, i found out that the film was a recreated documentary: in the late 1960s, some students at the Art Institute of Chicago decided to make a short film about someone they knew, a young woman who had dropped out of school to work in a factory. Just from that information, it seemed like a Simone Weil situation. And what Elizabeth Subrin did was to take the original short documentary and recreate it. And it retained the fascination of capturing so much of what was happening in the late 1960s (though Subrin made her film in the early 1990s). And there was a kicker: it turned out that the original subject of the documentary was Shulamith Firestone, the feminist writer, prior to her decision to start writing. Trent Harris's "The Beaver Trilogy" (which i've seen several times over the years, i think the first time was when it was shown as part of some series at the Walter Reade Theater) is one of the more anomalous works out there. It's been a while since i've seen it, but i know it begins with Trent Harris, who was working at a local TV station in Beaver, Utah, testing out some video equipment, and then running into a young man, Groovin' Gary, in the parking lot. The young man is eager to be recorded, and it turns out he's an aspiring entertainer. And the young man is trying to set up a talent show, and he's going to present his act, which consists of his impersonation of Olivia Newton-John. That's the original material, but what makes the work so bizarre is that Harris takes that material and then recreates it. Twice. The original material was taped in 1979; a little while later, Harris decided to recreate his original documentary, and he got a young actor to play Groovin' Gary. And then, Harris wasn't through with the material, so after a few years, he created another enacted version of his original documentary. The freak aspect of the work is that for the second version ("Beaver Kid 2"), Harris got Sean Penn, for the third version ("The Orkly Kid"), Harris got Crispin Glover. To watch the original documentary, and then to see these two very different actors (with very different approaches to acting) playing the same part... the whole exercise is incredibly provocative. "The Arbor" is a powerful work, the whole recreated aspect was done with such incredible artistry. And the original material (the audio recordings) was already very loaded, very emotionally powerful. The recreations provided a framework so that the emotional quality of the material wasn't gut-wrenching. In the past few years, Milestone has rereleased a number of films which have shown different ways of dealing with documentary material. The three great examples are "The Exiles", "On the Bowery" and "Araya". In terms of those films: seeing those films projected in a restored print is a revelation. The cinematography is so wonderful! But the DVDs are incredible, because the Milestone team has done a real job of providing all sorts of extras which really do illuminate the films. And each of these films had a very specific backstory, which was dramatic in and of itself. One of the things about "Araya" was that the very careful visual compositions recalled the highly stylized visuals of the Gomez-Zinnemann-Strand "The Waves". And here, we get into the very deliberate artistry involved in these documentary (or semi-documentary) films, which takes us back to "The Arbor" and the way documentary material is used.

2011-03-27T13:58:00.000-07:00

There seems to be a problem: i'm having a tough time logging onto my Blogger account, and i can't leave comments on some friends' blogs, and it takes a while for me to get back to this site. I don't know why, it says that cookies have been disabled on my computer, but i haven't done anything to do that. I did defragment my computer after i backed up my files of movie stills and then deleted them on my computer. But that shouldn't affect the rest of my computer. Oh, well.

2011-03-27T13:17:00.000-07:00

So much has happened in the past week. The international news has been unsettling (to put it mildly): the problems in Japan seem overwhelming and compounded by the ever-present threat of nuclear disaster; the Middle East continues to explode, but is American intervention in Libya really an option? Of course, on the show business front, the news was dominated by the death of Elizabeth Taylor. A lot of ink was spilled about her status as the last of the Hollywood goddesses (yes, there were many other stars, but there are few goddesses). Other notables deaths this week included Richard Leacock (with D.A. Pennebaker, a pioneering figure in the cinema verite movement) and Lanford Wilson (one of the major American playwrights and a stalwart of the off-off-Broadway movement). And this week brought the last press screenings for New Directors/New Films: "Attenberg" and "Fwd: Update on My Life" with "Shut Up, Little Man!" Other press screenings this week: "Le Quattro Volte" (which i missed at the New York Film Festival), Naruse's "Floating Clouds" (part of the upcoming "5 Japanese Divas" series at Film Forum), and "Obsession" and "Phantom of the Paradise" (part of the upcoming Brian De Palma series at BAMCinemathek). Seeing "Phantom of the Paradise" on the day when Lanford Wilson's obit appeared was a reminder of the off-off-Broadway scene. The star of "Phantom of the Paradise" was William Finley, who was (at the time) one of the lead actors of Richard Schechner's Performance Group (Finley was the star of the Performance Group's production of "Dionysus in 69", which De Palma had filmed). The character that Finley plays is named Winslow Leach, a nod to De Palma's friend Wilfred Leach, the theater director (with whom De Palma had co-directed his first feature film, "The Wedding Party", which had Jill Clayburgh and Valda Setterfield in the cast). And the female lead is (of course) Jessica Harper, who had been working with Richard Foreman when De Palma saw her. I didn't make it to the IRAs last night, because i felt at such a disadvantage: since half of 2010 was spent in Europe, i didn't feel comptent to venture an opinion on what had been released in the US in 2010, though Berlin certainly got its fair number of American commercial releases. But it was difficult to see foreign releases, and so a lot of those movies ("A Prophet", "I Am Love", et al) were problematic, i.e., i didn't get to see them. And tonight is the first part of Todd Haynes's miniseries of "Mildred Pierce" starring Kate Winslet. There has been so much happening on the dance front: last week, Martha Graham's company, Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer all presented concerts. And last week brought the AICA Awards, but it was crowded and i didn't stay. We did go to the press preview for the Glenn Ligon exhibition at the Whitney Museum, and that show was certainly thought-provoking. So there is a lot to write about.

2011-03-14T11:33:00.000-07:00

Since awards week, there has been screenings for Rendez-vous With French Cinema, some revivals of French classics (Bresson's "Diary of a Country Priest" and Truffaut's "The Soft Skin", which bookended the recent French series for me), and New Directors/New Films. But the catastrophes in the world have taken precedence.

Japan is devastated by the most powerful earthquake to have struck since these have been recorded. But a continual danger: the nuclear reactors in Japan, how stable are they and what happens in a meltdown.

And closer to home: last week brought intense flooding to the area, including incredible damage to parts of New Jersey and Connecticut.

Turner Classic Movies has had some amusing programming. The "guest programmer" this month turns out to be staffers at TCM, and in some cases the films will be TCM premieres. I'm looking forward to "Caught", which i continue to think is one of Ophuls's best movies; one premiere last week turned out to be "A Taste of Honey", which i caught a while ago when it was shown on one of the cable channels (HBO or Showtime, can't remember). It was interesting to see, especially after watching "Georgy Girl" again last week. The change from kitchen-sink England to Swinging England wasn't really that dramatic, there are always those touches of humor in the kitchen-sink movies which point to what would develop. (In "A Taste of Honey", it can be found in such scenes as the ones where Jo and Geoff go to the fair, and go shopping for baby things.)

Yesterday (Sunday) there was a whole night devoted to Joan of Arc films. The 1949 "Joan of Arc" (mostly directed by Victor Fleming) was disconcerting to see: watching it on high-definition television, it's so obvious that a lot of the scenes were done against painted scenery. The opening at the cathedral, for example: the whole scene is fake, right down to the painted rays of sunlight! I hadn't seen that film since i was a child, and it was almost intolerable. And Ingrid Bergman is beautiful but fatuous: her nobility gets tiresome, and she's relying on her luminosity in a way which is patently false. "Saint Joan" is even more of a disaster than i remembered (and i've seen the movie several times). What did Graham Greene do to the play? I'm not even talking about opening it up, i'm talking about the wholesale removal of the Shavian wit! And Jean Seberg just has no finesse: she's so earnest!

Of course, Dreyer's "La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc" and Bresson's "Proces de Jeanne d'Arc" were examples of true piety. And restorative: they show how the subject can be approached with real artistry.

2011-03-02T07:29:00.001-08:00

So much has been happening in the last three weeks (since i last posted). Of course, internationally, the political situation has never been more volatile, and the Middle East is in absolute turmoil. And in this country, the union-busting efforts of the politicians in Wisconsin have caused a real surge of activity.

But (let's face it) for those of us who toil (in some fashion or other) in the movies, the past few weeks were all about the end of award season, i.e., the double hammy of the Independent Spirit Awards (feb. 26) and the Academy Awards (feb. 27). And it really was a double whammy this year. So many people complained about the shows, but (really) who cares about the shows? When were award shows ever "good"? The Tony Awards used to be relatively tasteful and timely, but Broadway is relatively classy as opposed to the agreed-upon crassness of Hollywood. This year, Peter Knegt at IndieWire asked me to participate in the "Who Will Win/Who Should Win" poll. At first, i was hesitant (what hesitant? i wasn't going to do it) but then i decided, what the hell. So i sent in my "Who Will Win" choices, and i did pretty well in guessing the general mood. But no "Who Should Win", because (really) i have no stake in it and i don't really care. People tried to generate suspense by suggesting alternative possibilities (could Annette Bening pull out a last minute upset? will Melissa Leo's faux-pas in taking out her own "For Your Consideration" ads in the trades hurt her?), but i had a feeling it wasn't going to happen.

So the shows went on, and were (mostly) dreadful. And who cares? The winners were the winners, i guessed most of them, the people who got the awards were as expected and were as deserving as any others.

But what was interesting about this year's Academy Awards turned out to be the various indicators about the industry at this time. And that's something i want to go into, so i shall at a later date.

In terms of movies: i spent two weeks seeing French movies, the press screenings for Rendez-vous With French Cinema, which i bookended with a press screening for Bresson's "Journal d'un Cure de Campagne" and a press screening for Truffaut's "La Peau Douce". One amusing fact about Truffaut: i don't know whether it was conscious or not on his part, but the American titles of many of his movies are better than the original French titles, because the American titles are alliterative and catchy. Thus: "La Mariee etait en noir" became "The Bride Wore Black", "La Sirene du Mississippi" became "Mississippi Mermaid", "Domicile Conjugale" became "Bed and Board". "La Peau Douce" became "The Soft Skin". I wound up seeing eight of the films in the Rendez-vous series, and i have to say it wasn't such a bad year. But the absolute rigor and power of Bresson, and the glancing mastery of Truffaut, are virtues that the French cinema is not likely to repeat. Again, more on that later.

2011-02-07T08:23:00.001-08:00

The announcements of the deaths of Maria Schneider (3 february 2011) and then of Lena Nyman (4 february 2011) caused some comment about sexual expression in the cinema, since both these women will be remembered for their contributions to landmark films: Schneider with Bernardo Bertlucci's "Last Tango in Paris" and Nyman with Vilgot Sjoman's "I Am Curious - Yellow" and "I Am Curious - Blue". There was a time, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the idea of artistic freedom was being bandied about in terms of sexual liberation, and that was the prime marketing device behind many underground movies (from Robert Downey, Sr. to Andy Warhol-Paul Morrissey), as well as movies like Joseph Strick's version of "Ulysses", "Coming Apart", even "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice". Rather like the simultaneous deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni on 30 july 2007, the proximity of the deaths of Schneider and Nyman became a cause for reflection, but one which obscured the very real differences between them.

In the case of Schneider: she was a rather wayward person who did not have much acting experience when she was cast by Bertolucci. She was only 19 years old, and the resulting notoriety didn't exactly help her find stability in her life. Lena Nyman was already an experienced actress in her late 20s; she had already worked with Sjoman on his film "491", and she had extensive experience on stage and in films, and she simply continued her career in Sweden, resisting attempts to try for an international career. Because of the profiles of Marlon Brando and Bertolucci, Schneider couldn't help but be thrust into the international spotlight, and she had nothing to fall back on.

If "Last Tango in Paris" is Schneider's most famous credit, she also was in some other notable films, such as Antonioni's "The Passenger" and Jacques Rivette's "Merry-Go-Round". Nyman had worked with Alf Sjoberg in the 1950s, and, as mentioned, she had a role in Sjoman's delinquent drama "491" prior to "I Am Curious"; one of the memorable films she was in after "I Am Curious" was Ingmar Bergman's "Autumn Sonata" where she played the handicapped daughter of Ingrid Bergman.

So much for that. Some movie oddities of late. Anthology Film Archives will be showing a documentary from Spain, Mercedes Alvarez's "The Sky Turns". From the press release, i assumed that the movie was a recent one. And the description (a woman returns to her hometown, which is a village in rural Spain which is rapidly losing population as most of the people have moved to the cities for jobs, etc.) didn't quite ring a bell. So i go to the press screening. And the movie is rather leisurely, with a unstressed panoramic visual style. But a lot of the shots look awfully familiar: have i seen other documentaries about this region of Spain? The village is Aldealsenor, it's located in northwest Spain. Then, about an hour into the movie, things aren't just familiar, i know i've seen this movie before! There's a scene with two neighbors talking across their yards, and one man is sitting on a makeshift chair, with a board placed on the seat, and after their conversation, the old man simple dismantles the chair. And it's followed by a scene in which a shepherd talks to a runner, and it turns out that both men are Moroccans who are transplants to the area. And they discuss the history of Muslims in Spain, the runner's being part of the Olympic team, the area's agricultural strengths. It's a very lovely, ruminative film, but where did i see it? And when? It turns out that the movie was actually made in 2005, so it's been knocking around for a while, but where was it shown previously? And i know i didn't see it within the last year.

We went to the opening for Lorna Simpson's exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum; while i was there, i noticed an older couple, and i tried to think where i'd met them before. Then i realized: i didn't know them, but i had seen them in a movie! They were Betty and George Woodman, and i had just seen the documentary "The Woodmans". I had really intended to write about "The Woodmans" after i saw it, but then, i couldn't really articulate my feelings. The crux of the film is the story of their daughter, Francesca, who had been a "promising" artist/photographer when she killed herself at the age of 22 in 1981. Here's a family of artists (George is a painter, Betty is a ceramicist, their son Charles works in electronic media): how does this tragedy define their lives? Because it does.

I thought the documentary (directed by C. Scott Willis) was well-done, but talking about the movie after the press screening, i felt a certain agitation. The agitation was: this was about real people, and how are we supposed to judge? They're not characters, they're people who've had to deal with a real tragedy. And whatever you say about that, it seems somehow impertinent.

And i'm not exactly innocent in this situation: when we were editing PAJ, we started publishing articles on the new trends in "art photography", and i remember there were articles on Joel-Peter Witkin, on the "pictures" artists (Sarah Charlesworth, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons) and (yes) Francesca Woodman. And we knew we were in on something, because the big art journals (ArtNews, Art in America, Artforum) weren't touching this stuff, and within a year, that was all they were focusing on.

So the shift in sensibility which would elevate Francesca Woodman to an important artist (of course, there was the irony that this happened after her death) was part of the editorial development of PAJ as Larry and i tried to keep current. So i'm very aware of how Francesca Woodman's posthumous reputation began. And in the film, there is the dynamic, as George Woodman's work begins to gain artworld recognition as part of the "Pattern and Decoration" movement, which would be overtaken by the New Image painters, the "NeoExpressionists" and by the new art photography, just as his daughter's work would become a standard-bearer for art photography after her death.

There's so much to write about. I went to some of the press screenings for the Dance On Camera series at the Walter Reade Theater: i saw Nicolas Ribowski's "Les Reflets de la danse", Fabrice Herrault's "Claude Bessy; lignes d'une vie" and Anne Linsel and Rainer Hoffman's "Tanz Traume". That, plus attending Trisha Brown's concert at MoMA, made me think about the changes in the way dance is judged. Well, those plus "Black Swan", which is shaping up as the most hotly debated movie in recent months. Even more than "The Social Network", "Black Swan" really is a movie which has people up in arms and ready to fight!

As Audrey Hepburn says in "Love In the Afternoon": more later.

2011-01-30T06:18:00.001-08:00

This past week, there was a "mystery" in the art world: by last Sunday, there were "rumors" about Dennis Oppenheim's death, but there was no confirmation. And because of that, the New York Times refused to publish an obituary. Could this be an elaborate hoax, the ultimate in conceptual art? Or was this real? Finally, by Wednesday, the circumstances and the actuality of Dennis Oppenheim's death proved to be true, the funeral was held that day, and the obituary was promptly printed in Thursday's Times (which we never saw because there was another snow storm and that messed up delivery of the New York Times). But the obituary was online. The whole situation was very bizarre. In this era of instant communication, with e.mails and texting and the internet, there are still so many areas of miscommunication.

And right now, we're watching as Egypt explodes, as the young people in that country are demanding (among other things) the right to access to electronic communication options. And we are getting so many images from these new devices, like cellphones with built-in cameras. But the United States is in a curious position, since the protesters are pro-democracy, and the US interests are tied to the current dictatorship. Capitalism isn't democratic: it's always aligned with the most repressive regimes, which can provide a cheap labor mass and non-competitive rates.

Enough with the unpaid political announcements. Back to obits. A while back, i was asked why i kept posting about the deaths of various people (Blake Edwards, Ellen Stewart, Susannah York, et al) and it's because, after a certain age, the people one encountered and/or admired during that period when one was becoming interested in the arts are now at the point where they're dying off. Someone like Ellen Stewart, or Dennis Oppenheim, or Milton Babbitt (whose obit just appeared in today's NY Times), played such a crucial role in the development of off-off-Broadway theater, or post-Minimal art, or new music, and so many people were influenced by them. The interconnectedness of the American arts in the postwar expansion, from 1946 to 1990, made it impossible for anyone to be immune to these influences.

As i mentioned about Ellen Stewart, i was not someone who was part of the La Mama circuit, but since i toiled off-off-Broadway, i certainly was acquainted with her. Dennis Oppenheim was an artist who knew many of my friends: he was an artist who liked to surround himself with younger artists, and he'd often show up at openings, as if he were checking out the competition. Though Milton Babbitt came from the generation of American composers (see also Morton Feldman, Earl Brown, et al) whose seriousness often resulted in a kind of obscurity, his teaching at Princeton turned out to be incredibly influential; one of his students would be Stephen Sondheim.

But i remember going to concerts in the 1960s and 1970s of music by Babbitt, Stefan Volpe, Brown, or seeing Dennis Oppenheim at the various art openings and art parties, or (of course) seeing Ellen Stewart at La Mama.

But there's a lot of other things to write about, since the past few weeks have brought about a lot of events. This week brought the announcement of the Academy Award nominations. Unlike other years, when the choices ranged from the grossly popular ("Avatar") to the unfortunately obscure ("The Hurt Locker"), this year the nominees included movies which (surprise, surprise) actually connected with audiences, as witness their (relative) box office success. I use the term "relative" because a low-budget movie (such as "Black Swan" which was reportedly brought in for about $13 million) which is now on track to break $100 million at the box office, just as "The Kids Are All Right" (budgeted at about $6 million) went on to a box office of about $50 million. The fact that these movies are hits, that there proved to be ways of marketing these movies, of getting them into theaters across the country, and of getting audiences to show up for these movies, is amazing. And this year, there are any number of movies nominated which people have actually seen: not just blockbusters like "Inception" but movies like "The Social Network", "Black Swan", "True Grit", "The Fighter" and "The King's Speech".

Going into last week, the momentum seemed to be with "The Social Network" but all that has changed: last Sunday, the Producers Guild announced their awards, and their winner was "The King's Speech"; yesterday, the Directors Guild announced their awards, and the winner was Tom Hooper for "The King's Speech". That's two for two in two of the most important races before the Academy Awards. So it's going to be a real horse race.

If "The King's Speech" wins (which i have a feeling is a strong possibility), then it will represent the fact that, no matter how much "younger" the Academy gets, it will always skew towards sentiment. Which is fine; what i hate is people whining about it. In 1941, it seemed obvious that the vote would go to "How Green Was My Valley" over "Citizen Kane": "Valley" was a big hit box-office-wise, as well as a deeply emotional drama, while "Citizen Kane" was a box-office-flop and was "cerebral" besides, and movies that are in any way reflective are not exactly Hollywood's strong suit. What Hollywood? A majority of moviegoers aren't exactly reflective.

"The Social Network" is a movie of-the-moment, a movie that, with all its flaws (and many of the flaws are remarkably similar to "Citizen Kane", such as the cheap-jack melodramatics of the motivation, comic-book Freud as even Orson Welles once acknowledged), is a contemporary movie in the same way that movies like "Bonnie And Clyde" and "The Graduate" seemed to be contemporary in their time. And it's indicative of the fact that we're so unused to movies connecting in that way now, that people are hostile and suspicious of it, as if there's something wrong with a movie that's smart and a hit. Right now, i'm watching "The Lost Weekend", which was another movie that, in its time, seemed up-to-the-minute, with its serious-problem dramatics and its on-location shooting.

In terms of the Academy Award nominations, there are some obvious recommendations: if you're a micro-indie and you've got some critical momentum to your film, get your screeners to the Academy membership. Don't think that these people are going to seek out your little movie, which may not be playing anymore, or, if playing, may be in some obscure little art house which nobody goes to. Make sure these people see your movie. This is the way the "Winter's Bone" people are operating. The result? Nominations for Best Film, Best Actress (Jennifer Lawrence), Best Supporting Actor (John Hawkes) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini). When Debra Granik came out with "Down to the Bone" a few years ago, she operated on the indie-filmmaker assumption that her little masterwork was so important that the Academy membership would seek it out. As if! Even with something like the Independent Spirit Awards, you can't assume that people will seek out your movie. In many cases, how can they? Make sure that your publicity budget includes the cost of making DV-Rs and mailing them out. This winter, for example, is brutal, and it's making traveling in New York City difficult, so attending the special Independent Spirit screenings isn't really easy or feasible. This is especially true for minority filmmakers. A movie like "Night Catches Us" needs that little push that can come when you send out your screeners. But since they're not bothering, "Night Catches Us" will be one of those movies that will get overlooked. That's all i'm saying.

2011-01-17T21:20:00.001-08:00

The last few days have been perplexing. As with a lot of other "downtown" people, i was immensely saddened when i heard about the death of Ellen Stewart. She was a true pioneer, a cultural icon, and her death was another indicator of the inevitable passage of time. I was one of those people who really didn't have much to do with Ellen Stewart; when i was working off-off-Broadway, i was associated with Theater for the New City, but i always knew that the origins of off-off-Broadway were with The Judson Church, Theater Genesis at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, Caffe Cino (Joe Cino), and Cafe LaMama (Ellen Stewart), so you had two churches and two cafes. Joe Cino's death ended the Caffe Cino, but Cafe LaMama was transformed into LaMama E.T.C. (Experimental Theater Club); if i remember correctly, the first time you went, you had to pay a fee for membership, and by making the claim that this was a "club" Ellen Stewart was able to keep her place open without having to bring her space up to code as a theater. That fiction of the theater club lasted for only a few years in the late 1960s; certainly, by 1970, the reputation of LaMama had been established and the "membership" was no longer needed. Ellen Stewart was certainly resourceful, not only did she keep her theater open, but she made it thrive and she was able to create one of the essential theaters in New York City. But i knew her slightly, and i certainly appreciated what she did for American culture, i remember going to see many things at the various La Mama spaces. What was funny was that when La Mama was in full swing, with many different events, the openings were always staggered, so that Ellen Stewart could make sure that she would be there to ring that bell and give her little spiel ("Welcome to LaMama, dedicated to ze playwright and all aspects of ze theater").

On Sunday, i went to The Museum of Modern Art to see the film from Uruguay, "A Useful Life", and the dance concert by Trisha Brown. I'll try to get to "A Useful Life" later, but i wanted to say something about Trisha Brown.

This was the second "anniversary" concert that she gave at a New York City museum; the other was the concert at the Whitney in October 2010. As with that concert, she revived pieces from the late 1960s and early 1970s, the pieces which were more task-oriented rather than "theatrical". And (as with the Whitney concert) these pieces hold up surprisingly well. The concluding piece, "Roof Piece Re-Layed", was an exceedingly clever reworking of "Roof Piece", using the specifics of MoMA's atrium to simulate the expanses of the Soho rooftops. I was glad i'd made the effort to see this concert (and it wasn't easy, since the R trains weren't running in Brooklyn on the weekend).

2011-01-12T21:31:00.000-08:00

A new year (already in its second week) and already there has been so much happening. The weather continues to wreck havoc, not just throughout the United States but in most of the world. Europe continues to be gripped by another horrendous winter, there is intense flooding in parts of Australia, every few days there are reports of flooding and mudslides in China or South America. And in the last two weeks, New York City has been hit with two massive snow storms. When i left for Berlin, the subway system at least worked well. Now, it's haphazard, with frequent disruptions. There's a notice that the R trains will not run on the weekends, which effectively kills any attempt to go anywhere. And this is going on for a month!

But there have been a lot of movies. It's hard to know where to begin.

The first thing i want to say is that there is a fatigue factor setting in with all the documentaries that are proliferating. It's too much. Also, i often feel very incompetent: i don't know what i'm supposed to judge. If a film is effective, it's effective, but what does that mean? I'm not an expert on education ("Waiting for Superman"), i'm not an expert on finance ("Inside Job"), i'm not an expert on politics ("Client 9"). Two quick examples from the recent Jewish Film Festival at the Walter Reade Theater: "Stalin Thought of You" (directed by Kevin McNeer) and "As Lilith" (directed by Eytan Harris). In the first film, the whole context of censorship and repression during the Stalinist period was assumed, but the specifics were often obscured. In the second film, it's established that there are very strict religious laws in Israel regarding funerals and the deposition of bodies, and cremation seems to be outlawed. But the funerary laws are never adequately explained for the audience outside of Israel to get a real sense of the problems facing this particular family. This happens too often, and one finds oneself responding to a documentary according to one's own preconceptions.

Another problem with a lot of documentaries is that they are show business chronicles; many of them are simply documents of performances. "And Everything Is Going Fine" (Soderberg's pastiche of Spalding Gray), "Public Speaking" (Scorsese's portrait of Fran Liebowitz), "Wishful Drinking" (a World of Wonder distillation of Carrie Fisher), "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work", "Bette Midler: The Showgirl Must Go On".

Both Luise Rainer and Manoel de Oliviera have reached their centennaries. Tonight, TCM had a tribute to Luise Rainer, with a half-hour interview she did with Robert Osborne last year, and "The Good Earth" and "The Great Ziegfeld". Luise Rainer is one of those actresses who always is pointed to as an example of the vagaries of awards: this woman was a two-time Academy Award winner (and one time New York Film Critics Award winner) over such actresses as Barbara Stanwyck in "Stella Dallas", Carole Lombard in "My Man Godfrey", Irene Dunne in "Theodora Goes Wild" and "The Awful Truth", and Greta Garbo in "Camille". Yet seeing these films again, there's no denying that, in some ineffable way, Luise Rainer was certainly a star. (And being a star has nothing to do with the amount of time on the screen, it has everything to do with the particular intensity of the performance. Luise Rainer is billed third in "The Great Ziegfeld", and she occupies about an hour of its nearly three hour running time, but once she comes on, she just about pelts you with her manic flutteriness. Myrna Loy is lovely, but almost pallid compared to Rainer.)

And who has ever gone into their 100s with their creativity intact? 2010 brought the release of two movies directed by Manoel de Oliviera: "Eccentricities of a Blond-Haired Girl" and "The Strange Case of Angelica", remarkable films in any case, but especially so coming from a man now 102! It's amazing to me to remember when his "Doomed Love" was shown at New Directors/New Films: we assumed that, since he was in his 70s, "Doomed Love" would be one of his last movies. Who could have foreseen that it would be the first in a continuing series of films? Who would have imagined Manoel de Oliviera was only getting started? Dustin Hoffman was asked who he admired, and his answer was Manoel de Oliviera, because de Oliviera is still working and has lived to be 102. And if that's not something to admire, i don't know what is.

2010-12-26T20:53:00.001-08:00

A blizzard is hitting the American northeast, and it has been snowing for hours. The past few weeks have been interesting in terms of movies: it's amazing what's been doing well at the specialty box office. Some movies which have been building their audiences include "Black Swan", "The King's Speech", "The Fighter".

I did file my ballots for the VillageVoice/LA Weekly poll and the IndieWire poll; because of the difference in the scoring, my selections were slightly different, though the first five films were the same. Usually, in these polls, i'm very conscious of the fact that the films which i see in any given year are mostly the smaller independent and/or foreign releases, and i alway gear my ballots accordingly, in order to highlight movies i think are worthwhile but which might not make other people's ballots. (Since i've been doing these polls, examples would include Ken Jacobs's "Star Spangled to Death", Agnes Varda's "The Beaches of Agnes", Tsai Ming-liang's "Goodbye Dragon Inn".) I don't expect the movies i see to garner a majority of votes; another problem is that the movies i see and like often have a very delayed release. One of my peculiarities is that on my ballots i try to only mention each film once: if i mention a film because of the writing or the acting, it's because i'm trying to single out specific achievements. So (as an example) if i listed "The Kids Are All Right" as one of my best films (i did), i didn't mention Annette Bening or Julianne Moore (though i did think their performances were exceptional).

I've been thinking about the polls, the results and the reactions. I saw more movies in commercial release this year than in the entire decade past: being in Berlin, i saw whatever movies were playing, and the international release for most major commercial films is pretty uniform. So i wound up seeing a movie like Paul Greengrass's "Green Zone", which i found to be very well-done, with a sharp and informative script and some excellent performances. I also saw a movie like Atom Egoyan's "Chloe", which didn't quite work, but i thought the actors (Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson, Amanda Seyfried) were good, and i didn't regret seeing it.

Of course, one of the good things about Berlin was the Kino Arsenal, because every month there was always a retrospective of great merit. While i was there, some of the directors surveyed included Michelangelo Antonioni, Carl Dreyer, the Dardenne Brothers, John Ford, Daniel Schmid, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, so there was usually something worthwhile.

Some of the most important films i saw this year were restorations or revivals. Two such revelations were John Ford's "The Sun Shines Bright" (which i saw in an excellent 35mm print at the Kino Arsenal, which made me realize that the times i had seen it before it has been in 16mm prints) and Edward Bland's "The Cry of Jazz". Antonioni's "Le Amiche" played at Film Forum here in NYC; this was taken as the theatrical premiere by many, though "Le Amiche" was shown in NYC in 1963. It might not have been reviewed in the New York Times, but Stanley Kauffmann and Dwight MacDonald took the time to write about the film because of the limited run (which might have been at The New Yorker).

One of my favorite films of 2010 was Manoel de Oliviera's "The Strange Case of Angelica", which is an amazing film no matter how you look at it. A funny, melancholic fable about mortality, it was just a seamless display of offhand mastery, with special effects that seemed charmingly old-fashioned. How astounding that Manoel de Oliviera is over 100 years old! With the release of both "Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl" (made in 2009) and his latest "The Strange Case of Angelica", he's so obviously the filmmaker of the year.

2010-12-10T07:31:00.001-08:00

I've spent the last few days trying to come up with my lists for the Village Voice/LA Weekly annual film critics poll. One thing: because of the release patterns for American movies in the international market, i was able to see a lot of the commercial movies which i ordinarily wouldn't have seen. The Kino Arsenal and the Berlin Film Festival (even though i had a horrendous time with the press office) also provided a lot of compensations in terms of indie films and international films (big example: "Our Beloved Month of August"). A movie like "Green Zone" (which proved to be engrossing and quite impressive) was a movie i would have missed in New York City, but i saw it in Berlin. Usually, with the acting catgeories, i try to avoid the usual American/English candidates; perhaps that's a little snobbish, but that's been my modus operandi.

But it's hard to know American release dates. One example: a film which i loved was Joao Pedro Rodrigues's "To Die Like a Man". But it's been playing the festival circuit (where it's racked up an impressive litany of critical commentaries) for two years now, but is it ever going to have a standard American theatrical release? There are movies like Soderbergh's "And Everything Is Going Fine" (a film "portrait" of Spalding Gray) which are getting a theatrical run, but "LennonNYC" and Scorsese's "Public Speaking" (about Fran Liebowitz) haven't gotten theatrical runs, though their exposure was probably greater on television. (And coming up: "Wishful Drinking", the World of Wonder guys' document of Carrie Fisher's one-person show, also on television.)

Ok: an admission that one problem i've been having with recent movies is the preponderance of documentaries. I'm a person whose aesthetic interests tend to be formalistic, and what can you say about most documentaries, which depend on the presentation of information? Sometimes, this information is "intimate", as in all these film portraits of show business/artistic personalities (Spalding Gray, John Lennon, Fran Liebowitz, Carrie Fisher, Joan Rivers, Keith Haring, Phil Spector, Mark Kostabi, et al) but then, what we judge are our own attitudes as reflected in those people. So the "judgement" becomes a reflection of our attitudes towards the person, and not a judgement about the film as a work of art. And to a larger extent, this is true of documentaries like "Client 9" or "Inside Job": our attitudes (towards Eliot Spitzer, towards Wall Street) necessarily color our judgement of those films.

In France, so much of the documentary tradition derives from a very literary basis. This is apparent in the work of Chris Marker, Agnes Varda, Alain Resnais. The commentary becomes an integral provider of meaning, so that analysis and information are presented jointly.

And this can be seen in Nicolas Philibert's "Nenette". I have to admit that when i went into the screening, i had certain preconceptions: years of seeing documentaries (on PBS's "Nature" or on Animal Planet) which provide these leisurely panoramic views of animal life. But "Nenette" is different. For one thing: the space is very confined, Nenette the orangutan is stuck in an enclosed space in the Jardin des Plantes Exotiques in Paris. So most of the shots of Nenette are simply close-ups of her as she lies around in her cage.

But what animates the film is the commentary; we hear what initially seems to be random comments. Presumably, this was recorded as the people walked through and stopped to look at Nenette. Some of the comments are funny, quite a few seem to be reading the information posted near the cage. And this commentary provides a verbal drama, as people recite the information, and that information is interrogated and interrupted. But gradually, one voice recites the facts of Nenette's life and that provides the narrative arc of the film.

So "Nenette" isn't simply an observational documentary on one orangutan in the zoo in Paris, but the commentary (which is "neutral") provides information which allows us to see Nenette "in the round" as it were. And i was struck at how much "Nenette" fit in to the documentary tradition in France, especially having seen such films as "The Beaches of Agnes" and "Remembrance of Things to Come" recently. The commentary turns what could have been simply an observational documentary in the Animal Planet mode into an essay on captivity. So "Nenette" turned out to be more complicated than i had anticipated, and is a better film for that reason.

2010-12-01T11:39:00.001-08:00

Both Irwin Kershner and Mario Monicelli died; i've just seen "The Passionate Thief", one of Monicelli's comedy-dramas, which was an excellent example of his particular style. Irwin Kershner's legacy is rather like Alec Guinness: it's gotten swamped by the "Star Wars" mystique.

Irwin Kershner's early movies ("The Hoodlum Priest", "The Luck of Ginger Coffey") were mired in distribution problems, which always happened with independent films during the 1950s and 1960s. When he tried to work in the studio system ("A Fine Madness" and "The Flim-Flam Man"), he wound up embroiled in difficulties, where his films were taken away and re-cut.

But his career is an example of how things turn out. Kershner was teaching film throughout the 1960s, and almost two decades later, one of his students would ask him to direct a film. The student was George Lucas and the film was "The Empire Strikes Back". And that was the lead in terms of all the obituaries.

Movies like "The Hoodlum Priest" and "The Luck of Ginger Coffey" are representative of the independent movies of the period (late 1950s-early 1960s): mostly black-and-white, with stories that dealt with "off-beat" subjects which weren't handled in Hollywood. Kershner's movies weren't as startling as movies like "On the Bowery" or "Shadows", but they were part of the attempt to create an "alternative" to Hollywood.

And the fact that Kershner's most noted credit would be the essence of the Hollywood system of the 1970s-1980s is perhaps symptomatic of most careers in the movies.

2010-12-01T08:50:00.000-08:00

Seeing Soderbergh's "And Everything Is Going Fine" was disconcerting; the way the work was edited, it really did seem almost seamless, and so fragments from recorded performances, television interviews, etc. meshed into one biographical portrait of Spalding Gray. I had to admire Steven Soderbergh's skill.

Last week, i watched "Public Speaking", Scorsese's movie about Fran Liebowitz, which was on HBO. Both of these pieces were very well-done, but they point to a certain problem with performance: how are we to judge people when they are presenting themselves?

Just watched "Looking For Eric"; there are so many "new" films being made which haven't gotten distribution, or there are foreign films ("Looking For Eric" is a British film, directed by Ken Loach) that had limited distribution here, and the cable stations are snapping them up, and so there are many chances to catch something you've missed. "Looking For Eric" opened in New York City during the winter, and actually played Berlin about a month later, but i missed it. (Two nights ago, i watched something called "Bedrooms", which was made this year, with Barry Bostwick and Dee Wallace. As far as i know, that one never got a release.) Now i'm watching "La Cucina", an indie about three women trying to cook, starring Leisha Hailey, Rachel Hunter and Christina Hendricks (before "Mad Men").

With both "Bedrooms" and "La Cucina", the "story" breaks down into segments so that there can be scenes between two (or three) people. In a way, it's so that the filmmaking is more manageable, but it's so obvious that it's distracting. This is the essence of what talent is, and what talent isn't. A movie like "Masculine Feminine" or "Before the Revolution" actually did the same thing, but there was such fluidity in the movie, who had time to notice that it was breaking down into two or three character sequences? "La Cucina" also provided one of those nagging moments; i caught the film after the credits had started, and missed the cast list. And the person who played Leisha Hailey's husband seemed awfully familiar, and i couldn't place him... and then i realized it was Osgood Perkins (the son of Anthony Perkins and Berry Berenson).

The problem with so many indie movies is that there really is a certain look, which is sort of the default position, not of limited means, but of limited talent. And both "Bedrooms" and "La Cucina" hit me right in the eye.

2010-11-29T20:57:00.000-08:00

Don't even know how long it's been since i posted anything. I've been seeing things, but it's also been very hectic trying to deal with the holidays. And already, it's almost time for the end-of-the-year round-ups. Just got my notification about the Village Voice/LA Weekly poll. It's due next week.

But what have i seen this year? Strangely enough, because of the way American movies are marketed nowadays, being in Berlin actually wasn't a detriment. There are a number of foreign movies that i missed, though i'm trying to catch up with some of them (such as Bellocchio's "Vincere") but it's been such a haphazard year. The categories for these polls (with actors and actresses and supporting actors and supporting actresses) presuppose dramatic narratives, but a good percentage of the films i get to see are documentaries. And though documentaries can be illuminating and informative, the specific qualities of imagination which drew me into the movies just aren't there in documentaries.

One reason i've been feeling out-of-it is that i feel very displaced. I came back to New York, and soon i was seeing the press screenings at the New York Film Festival, but i haven't been seeing other people. I'll give an example. A few weeks ago, i went to the press screening of Edward Bland's "The Cry of Jazz", a 1959 featurette recently restored by Anthology Film Archives. Now: i invited a friend to the screening, because Anthology's press screenings can be notoriously underpopulated. So i'm there with my friend, and one other person is there. That's it.

Then the movie has its run at Anthology... only J. Hoberman in The Village Voice and Richard Brody in The New Yorker devote considerable space to the movie. My question: when did they see this? There was only one press screening, and i didn't see them.

It was an incredibly fascinating film. As a film, it's rather crude, but as a dramatic polemic, it was mesmerizing, because it attempted to develop an argument about race in America which prefigured the attitudes of the 1960s, with the Black Panthers, Malcolm X and Amiri Baraka's "Dutchman". The film intermingles various concert footage with a single scene, the aftermath of a jazz club meeting, when a group of three African-American men and two white men and two white women remain, to discuss (actually, debate) the "meaning" (political, philosophical, sociological) of jazz. And the point is that jazz represents the soul of "the Negro" and "the Negro" is the conscience of America, and the fate of "the Negro" will be the fate of America, because how the country treats the people that it has enslaved will determine the humanity of the nation.

One sidelight: while watching the movie, i had this nagging feeling, because one of the young women, a tall, rather round-faced blonde, seemed very familiar. And her voice was so distinctive: i knew i'd heard that voice many times before. And the credits at the end of the movie didn't really help... and then, about an hour after i saw the film, i realized that "Linda" must have been a diminutive of her name, and then i realized that she was a teen-aged Melinda Dillon!

But what were some other highlights of this year?

2010-11-11T11:47:00.000-08:00

Today, woke up to find that there had been a derailment on the R line, so that meant delays (the derailment happened in Manhattan and i'm in Brooklyn, but any excuse for delays seems to be the modus operandi of the MTA), so i knew i wouldn't be able to make the press screening of Visconti's "Vaghe Stelle dell'Orsa" on time, so i decided to stay home. Tonight perhaps i'll go to the AICA lecture by Holland Cotter (i did RSVP, so that shouldn't be a problem, just as long as the subways are running, you never know, the morning commute was a mess and perhaps the same will happen this evening).

However, i have been going to see things, and i did see some enjoyable things and some utterly wonderful things. Among the enjoyable: Mario Monicelli's "The Passionate Thief" with a screenplay co-authored by Suso Cecchi D'Amico (the Film Society of Lincoln Center is doing a small retrospective; the woman was incredibly prolific and any series can only hope to show a portion of the voluminous number of films she contributed to; that was also why "Vaghe Stelle dell'Orsa" was being screened, though the Visconti movie i'm really dying to see again is "Conversation Piece" which is also in the series). Totally charming, with sweet performances by Toto and Anna Magnani (at one point - a truly magical moment - they do an old vaudeville number) as a couple of down-on-their-luck performers who are trying to find a way of having a good time on New Year's Eve. It was made in 1960, the black-and-white cinematography of Rome was gorgeous, the plot was outlandish (involving Ben Gazzara as a thief) and it was delightful. Monicelli has a talent for letting the humor of these situations come out without going overboard, this can make his films seem a bit tentative, but it's a lot better than getting hit over the head for boffo laughs. And it allows a performer like Magnani to show a less volcanic register. This is similar to the languid humor of "Big Deal on Madonna Street" (which was probably Monicelli's biggest hit internationally). Among the wonderful: Bruce Conner's films, and the Judson Dance Theater concert.

I've seen a lot of things in the past two weeks, including a panel discussion at the Judson Memorial Church about the performing arts there, as well as the dance concert commemorating the Judson Dance Theater, with work by Toby Armour, Remy Charlip, Carollee Schneemann, Aileen Passloff, and Yvonne Rainer. (These events were in conjunction with an exhibit at NYU's Fales Library about the Judson Church's various arts programs since the 1950s.) Some films i've seen include Eugene Green's "The Portuguese Nun" (which i found delightful, but i'm a sucker for his work) and Edward Bland's "The Cry of Jazz" (amazing!) which were at Anthology Film Archives; "Kawasaki's Rose" at Film Forum; the first program of the Bruce Conner films at Film Forum. I also went to see "For Colored Girls" which was playing at the local movie theater.

I also saw the big Abstract Expressionist show at The Museum of Modern Art, the Paul Thek retrospective at the Whitney Museum, as well as the Edward Hopper show at the Whitney. I think the Hopper show is a considerable exhibition, but it's also a canny move on the part of the Whitney: it's a perfect show for the holiday season, just in time for Thanksgiving and Christmas, sure to delight a wide audience. As for the Abstract Expressionist show: it's MoMA's greatest hits, and it's a deliberate reiteration of MoMA's essential position vis-a-vis American art since World War II. It's unsurprising but it's also impressive. It's hard for me to criticize the show, because this was the story of American art that i learned when i was growing up. It's hard to repudiate it, since my sensibility was formed by this work, and by the specific narrative about American art that MoMA fostered.

My lecture on the Judson Dance Theater is now online in Germany. I should include the link.

2010-10-18T18:27:00.000-07:00

Good grief! It's been more than three weeks since i've paid attention to this blog, though i've been faithfully following many of my friends (Reid Rosefelt, Michael O'Sulivan, Joe Baltake) who are quite diligent in posting.

I've been mulling over the New York Film Festival. The press screenings ended on October 8, and i found it to be quite a solid festival. And more than that, the choice of "The Social Network" for the opening night was astute. The movie really did seem to encompass a lot of the contemporary world, it was a movie that really seemed to express something in the zeitgeist. I was very excited by the movie (and i've been excited by several of David Fincher's movies, including "Zodiac" and "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button") and it was the kind of movie that was fun to talk about with friends.

One of the trends (in terms of the movies i saw) was an attempt to look at the past. Even movies which weren't ostensibly historical had a "timeless" quality that made them seem to be set in the past. Two of those movies would be Manoel de Oliviera's "The Strange Case of Angelica" and Raul Ruiz's "Mysteries of Lisbon". And Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives" was overtly about a man looking back on his past. One of the most controversial movies turned out to be Abdellatif Kechiche's "Black Venus"; was it a movie which exposed racial and sexual exploitation, or did the film wallow in racial and sexual exploitation? I would also throw in Jean-Luc Godard's "Film Socialisme" as a film which seemed timeless.

I feel like i should really be writing more about these films, especially "The Social Network". I like the fact that the New York Times has devoted several articles about film, including a very funny piece by Maureen Dowd in which she talks about the themes of the film in terms of Wagner's Ring Cycle.

One of the most frustrating screenings i went to was at Anthology Film Archives: a selection of films made between 1905 and 1912 by the Spanish filmmaker Segundo de Chomon. This is a program that will be coming to Anthology at the end of the month. What was frustrating was that i was the only person that showed up for the press screening. I mean: these are rare, restored 35mm prints of some amazing early cinema shorts, and there's no interest? Well, i'm interested in early cinema. And a movie like "La Grenouille" (1908) was just so enchanting. There's a woman prancing around a fountain. One of the things about these films is that many of them were hand-tinted. So the woman dances around when a frog jumps into the scene. The frog is actually someone in a frog suit, and the frog is painted green. The frog jumps around, and then the woman is transformed into a huge frog, and the huge frog is also painted this pale pistachio green. The differences in scale (the woman becoming a frog which is twice the size of the person in the frog outfit), the use of coloring, the seamless trick photography: these were done in such an appealing way, which accounts for the sheer magic of the film. And Segundo de Chomon's films were filled with these wonderful effects.

I also went to the press preview of "Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958-1968" at the Brooklyn Museum (Thursday, October 14). It was a very focussed show, carefully selected, it wasn't huge, but it was finely displayed. And it was good to see work by Marisol, Yayoi Kusama, and Rosalyn Drexler. But there were also discoveries: i was fascinated by the works by the British artist Jann Haworth.

The exhibition raised a lot of questions: what was the definition of "Pop" for the curators? Why were some artists included? For example: the inclusion of Faith Ringgold was surprising. But the usage of figuration in her paintings isn't really pop, anymore than (say) Alice Neel's work (which is also figurative) would be pop or even proto-pop.

I also went to the Whitney Museum, and saw the anniversary dance concert by Trisha Brown (Sunday, October 3). It was another event which raised a lot of questions, for example, the addition of music to "Accumulation" (which had always been done in silence). What happened was that the addition of music turned what had been a rigorous process exercise into... well, entertainment. "Not that there's anything wrong with that..." but there actually is something wrong with that. It's a subtle form of pandering, of making the work more palatable to the audience.

What made "The Social Network" so exciting was that the movie was crafted in such an impeccable way, but it didn't play down to the audience: Fincher, Aaron Sorkin and company assumed that there was an intelligent audience that would follow the movie, no matter how arcane the dialogue got.

It reminded me of seeing Richard Foreman's production of Arthur Kopit's play, "End of the World With Symposium To Follow", and in the second act, the scientists talk about the physics involved in the creation of the Atomic Bomb. It's very, very technical. So Foreman had the actors juggle during this scene! (Juggle? I think there was a reference to the use of the juggler in Yvonne Rainer's "The Mind Is a Muscle".) Obviously, Foreman felt that there was a need to have an element of spectacle to counter what would have been a drily didactic scene.

But... i would have preferred that the second act be drily didactic. Because i like to be drily didactic. I remember when i talked to Richard and asked him about the juggling, and he said, well, you can't just expect an audience to sit through a chunk of theory! And i said, why not? I do it all the time, and i make 'em love it!

Which reminds me of my one sort-of encounter with Arthur Penn (who died a few weeks ago). In the mid-1980s, Arthur Penn was part of the group (which also included Ellen Burstyn and Al Pacino) who were trying to salvage The Actor's Studio after the death of Lee Strasberg. Penn was in charge of the Playwrights Unit. So Crystal Field (who had studied at The Actor's Studio; with other members of The Actor's Studio in the early 1960s, she was part of the cast of "Splendor in the Grass") suggested me. So i get a call, and i drop off some of my plays to The Actor's Studio. A few weeks later, Arthur Penn tells Crystal that he can't see how anyone could sit through my work: he can't imagine an audience which would sit through a work in which the characters just sit in a cafe and argue about a movie! Or a "play" that was a panel discussion with the characters talking about the economics of avantgarde filmmaking, or a panel discussion with the characters talking about the gender and racial politics of the artworld. (What? Arthur Penn never sat through a panel discussion?)

That's my life, and if it's a life, it's enough for a play. Or a movie. And "The Social Network" proves it, because "The Social Network" is the movie of the year in the same way that "Bonnie and Clyde" was once the movie of its year. And when Arthur Penn said that about me, i knew: the guy's missed out, time's passed him by, and there's no way he's ever going to get back.

And he never did, as all the obits on him stated.

2010-09-26T19:30:00.000-07:00

The past week: on Monday, went to the lab for bloodwork, couldn't do it on Friday when i went to the doctor's because i got a flu shot. Missed the screening of "Poetry" because of that, but went to the screening of Gaspar Noe's "Enter the Void". Attempted feature-length "trip" movies aren't my thing. What can i say? I also didn't find it visually very distinguished: it's a far cry from (say) Jordan Belson or the Whitney Brothers or Harry Smith. In the evening, TCM showed a number of movies which have been recently restored, so i caught Fritz Lang's "Secret Beyond the Door" and Joseph Losey's "The Prowler".

Tuesday finally made it to the NY Film Festival; caught "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives" and "Certified Copy". Wednesday, i didn't go in because i tried to finish writing, and it was supposed to rain; the week before there had been a tornado which went through Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island (some areas still have no electricity) and i was a little freaked out. But it turned out TCM was having an Erich von Stroheim day, so i watched "The Merry Widow" (it's amazing how von Stroheim was able to turn Lehar's operetta into another one of his Ruritainian anti-romances, like "Blind Husbands" and "The Wedding March" and "Queen Kelly"), "Greed", "Friends and Lovers" and "Five Graves to Cairo". And yes, it did rain, and at one point it was pretty severe but the rain passed rather quickly. Thursday, i went to see "My Joy" and "Of Gods and Men".

Friday the screenings were "The Social Network" (a packed screening, but for some reason, i must have some sort of avoidance sign, because there were five empty seats around me) and Godard's "Film Socialisme".

When i came home, i found signs on the subway, announcing the problems with subway service on the weekend. No R service in Brooklyn. So i decided to stay home. Thought i'd watch "The Hurt Locker" but Showtime (as it often does) kept breaking up. I had already seen it but wanted to check whether or not it was as tightly directed as i remembered. It was. But i turned to watch "Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon"; i saw it from a screener sent by TLA, but it seemed a little different. (The screener was not the final cut.) Then i watched "The September Issue".

But i was in a daze. What happened was i was sent an online journal, which was supposed to have the transcript of a lecture i gave at the Freie Universitat Berlin. But the transcript was a total mess, because i wasn't asked to proof it, and the transcript is riddled with errors. Quite simply: it was supposed to be a lecture about the Judson Dance Theater, and every other name is spelled wrong, or else there is an approximation, because the person who did the transcript doesn't know the names. So the point of my lecture (which is about accuracy and alternatives, i.e., if you're researching a phenomenon like the Judson Dance Theater, don't just stick to the same names again and again, if you do a little research, you'll also find other names that will bear investigating) is lost, because the transcript is totally inaccurate! And the person who did the transcript doesn't seem to understand what the problem is. He doesn't understand how my reputation as a "scholar" has been ruined because of his sloppy work. It makes it seem as if i don't know what i'm talking about, because i can't get the names right.

But this seems to be par for the course with people under 30 nowadays: an incredible arrogance, a feeling of entitlement. He thinks he can use my work, even if he has reduced it to utter rubbish, and no, there is no payment, and no, he did not have my permission to record the lecture. But he thinks my lecture is something that will help him in terms of his "career", but he's just ruined mine.

Ok. So that's why i'm upset. And also: i spent five weeks actually writing out my lecture (when i delivered the lecture in June, it was extemporaneous, and i went through a lot of information that i knew fast). The reason it took so long was that i went and did a lot of research, because i knew that (say) Yvonne Rainer in her many writings and interviews, or Jill Johnston in "Marmalade Me" or Sally Banes in her books "Democracy's Body" or "Terpsichore in Sneakers" would have information which would back up my claims. And i was right. (For example: one of my points was that Yvonne Rainer's piece "We Shall Run" was not simply a "running" piece, it was more like a precursor of something like Paul Taylor's "Esplanade", because it was running in very complex patterns set to music, and Rainer herself says that in an interview she did with Lynn Blumenthal.) So i was very careful to make sure that i could prove everything i was saying. And now this transcript (which i did not do) makes a hash of my work, and sets me up for ridicule.

Once again!

Why does this always happen to me? I know why: because i'm an idiot!

But watched "Inspector Lewis" and "Dexter" tonight. Both of them were really sick: Larry and i loved them!

2010-09-25T20:50:00.000-07:00

This weekend, the subway system underwent major repair work, leaving only one out of the 19 subways lines running normally. I just figured i wasn't meant to get around, so i stayed home. Watched television. "Changeling" which turned out to be fairly engrossing but rather slow, Angelina Jolie was subdued but she was effective in her hysterical scenes. Tried to watch "The Hurt Locker" on Showtime, but it kept breaking up which was distracting; nevertheless, the first half hour that i saw was incredibly tight and tense. I turned to "Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon"; this was a documentary that i thought i had seen, because i received a screener from TLA a while ago, but a lot of it didn't seem familiar. Then i watched "The September Issue" on A&E. It was a very alienating experience. The only way i could watch it was to think about it as an example of the secularization of society, where the idea of "the sublime" (which was linked to religious idealism) has been discredited to the point where the meaning of art has devolved into the issue of beauty, and so art has become fashion as opposed to the vessel of cultural meaning. Because we don't have meaning anymore.

I did go to press screenings this week, including several screenings of the New York Film Festival. But i'm exhausted so i'll wait to go into what i saw.

2010-09-19T07:23:00.000-07:00

Haven't blogged, haven't seen much, haven't gone anywhere. Basically, i've been stuck at home, trying to finish writing. It's taken me four weeks, going on five. I can't take it anymore. (This always happens: i spend too much time writing, i get cabin fever.)

But the "it's a small world" phenomenon: i decided i should start reading more. But just to start, i got some movie star autobiographies. Two were: "Thank Heaven" by Leslie Caron, and "Include Me Out" by Farley Granger with Robert Calhoun. Now: how is it a small world? Well: in her acknowledgements, Leslie Caron begins by thanking Bruce Benderson. Bruce Benderson? Now, how many writer-editors who've lived in Paris can there be with the name Bruce Benderson? I mean, Bruce Benderson is the writer who was working at CAPS in 1975; another small world coincidence: Bruce turned out to be a friend of Daile Kaplan, and Daile and i were both working for Jonas Mekas at the time (1975). In "Include Me Out", Farley Granger mentions a play that fell through, that was going to be directed by his friend Shirley Kaplan. Unless there's another Shirley Kaplan working in the theater as a director, she's the person who has been teaching at Sarah Lawrence, and was part of the faculty along with June Ekman and Remy Charlip. And June is the person who worked with Anna Halprin, and was a friend of Trisha Brown's and Yvonne Rainer's in the 1960s. June and Shirley were on the faculty at Sarah Lawrence and were among the teachers of Bob Harris when he went to Sarah Lawrence (as part of the first co-ed class in the early 1970s). Bob Harris (of course) was Shigeko Kubota's assistant for the video program at Anthology Film Archives in 1975.

And (of course) i've just been a hermit for five weeks, revising my essay on Jonas Mekas's film "In Between", which was the diary film Jonas made in 1978, during the time when i was working for him. It's one of those freak occurences: the other big essay i was finishing was the write-up of the lecture i gave at the Freie Universitat Berlin, about the Judson Dance Theater. And so in the last five weeks, i've been looking up stuff about Jonas, and about the Judson Dance Theater (where i came across the name of June Ekman). And even trying to relax, never in my wildest imagination would i think that there would ever be a connection with Leslie Caron. But it's like Facebook: we have Bruce Benderson as a friend in common.

And on Tuesday, i had gone to the memorial for Callie Angell. And that was another connection to Anthology Film Archives in the "old" days. One thing i have to say is that it wasn't a "sad" occasion, there were a lot of people from the old days, and the memorial accomplished what itw as supposed to: there was a feeling of comfort.

I felt sad that Callie's health had been deteriorating, and that she had reached the point where she couldn't see the possibility of a life without severe pain and disability. But i remember Callie as the person who was 21 years old and at her first job, which was as the librarian at Anthology Film Archives in 1969-70.

I remember the excitement we all felt when Anthology was set to open. Jonas asked me if i wanted to volunteer, and what i did was check out the prints of some films. But things were coming in. Callie was always getting new boxes which contained papers or books or other materials, and that meant a lot of filing and organizing. At the memorial, a lot of people were talking about how organized Callie was, and in the early days of Anthology, she had to be, or the library would never have been able to be functional.

It was nice to see people again: P. Adams Sitney, Nadia Sztendera... it's funny, because there were people who only knew Callie from the last decade or so, when she was the curator for the Andy Warhol Film Project. But i remember the old Anthology staff: Callie, Linda Patton, Ric Stanbery, Robert Polidori.

But i'm exhausted from the effort it took to write in the past five weeks.

I wish i could just have fun.

2010-09-03T23:15:00.000-07:00

Intended to write after the press screening of Lionel Rogosin's "On the Bowery" (new, restored print distributed by Milestone) but time slipped away. Time always seems to slip away now.

I've tried to get back into the swing of things, or at least some of the things in New York City. But it's the usual grind, and it's disconcerting to find oneself in the usual grind. The feeling is rather like having been trapped somewhere, and finally getting to see daylight, only daylight is a little blinding.

I was thinking of "On the Bowery" and how times have changed since i first saw that movie in the late 1960s. A lot of those documentaries/semi-documentaries from the period (including Kent Mackenzie's "The Exiles", or the Joseph Strick-Sidney Meyers "The Savage Eye", or Sidney Meyers' "The Quiet One") were described in terms like "stark"; the black-and-white cinematography caught aspects of the urban (New York or Los Angeles) landscape that had been glossed over in commercial movies, even when those movies were shot on location.

Quite frankly, at the time, those movies (and related movies such as Warhol's "Chelsea Girls" or Shirley Clarke's "Portrait of Jason") were about what we've come to call "abjection", about those people in society who were either marginalized or "downtrodden" (now there's an old-fashioned term from that period). But i guess you could say that the lyricism of those movies came from the depiction of what had been described as the "city symphony", those documentaries in the 1920s which tried to find the poetry in the developing industrialized urban centers (cf. Cavalcanti's "Rien Que les Heures", Vertov's "The Man With a Movie Camera", Paul Strand's "Manhatta", Ruttmann's "Berlin Symphony of a City"). What became obvious was that, by the early 1970s, films shot on location in New York City ("Panic in Needle Park", "Klute", "French Connection", "Born to Win") were showing a city that seemed devastated. (There's some correlation between those movies and the movies made in Europe right after World War II, such as the Italian Neo-Realist movies like "Paisa" and "The Bicycle Thief", or British thrillers like "The Third Man" and "The Man Between.")

Trying to organize my ideas around these topics seems difficult right now, because there's a lot that remains quite inchoate and almost incomprehensible. For example: i've been doing a lot of reading about the Judson Dance Theater, in order to clarify a lot of the points i made in my lecture that i gave in June. But i find that the more i read, the less clear the Judson Dance Theater seems, because i'm finding it hard to remember my own responses. So much is filtered through other people's responses, and i find it hard to assert my own response.

2010-08-23T07:55:00.001-07:00

Don't know why it's taking me so long to readjust to being back home. Well, it is true that i was away for almost ten months, and i've never been away from New York City for so long in my entire life! But the last month has been a flurry of travelling: from Berlin to Munich, then Munich to New York City, then a week at home, then to and from Santa Fe. It was the travelling to and from Santa Fe that was the killer: the delays, getting stuck in the Dallas/Fort Worth airport for hours, the horrible cramped conditions in the airbuses that make up the final lap of the trip to Santa Fe... agh!

I feel like i never want to travel again! Since we've moved to Brooklyn, we haven't taken many trips. In fact, the only trip i took was the one to my niece's wedding in Napa Valley. That was it. Now that i'm back home, i don't even want to go on the subway!

But i have been watching things on television, i saw some movies, of course i've been watching TCM's Summer Under the Stars. For Paul Newman day, i watched "Rachel, Rachel" and "Paris Blues". "Paris Blues" is one of those movies which (in a way) has improved with time. At the time of its release, the movie was derided for its rather cliched view of la vie boheme in Paris, especially since the movie was released at a time when the first Nouvelle Vague films were being distributed, so the image of Parisian life had to compete with "Breathless", "The 400 Blows", "Les Cousins". And in terms of race relations, Kerouac's "The Subterraneans" and Baldwin's "Another Country" had already presented far more complex narratives. But now, the location shooting in Paris seems so evocative and lovely, especially in the exquisite black-and-white cinematography; Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Sidney Poitier and Diahann Carroll give appealing star performances, and there's the Duke Ellington music, as well as Louis Armstrong's appearance. What's not to like? As for "Rachel, Rachel", the acting in it was really exceptional, certainly, that's one area where Newman was quite gifted as a director.

There are many movies which are problematic, but, when looked from certain angles, are quite impressive. Once such movie was "The Sun Shines Bright", which i got to see (in a rare 35mm print) in Berlin. It's hard to explain, because the intensity with which Ford seens to infuse certain scenes is difficult to explain. On the surface, the material seems very retrograde (more so because the same material had already been used by John Ford in the 1930s), but Ford's feelings seem to overwhelm everything.

I'm just so tired. I can't seem to shake it. Just watched "The Ghosts of Girlfrends Past"; obviously, not a movie that i would watch in a theater, but i decided i should see it because it has Jennifer Garner, who (along with Jennifer Aniston) was an object of scorn in a recent column by Maureen Dowd. Jennifer Garner isn't bad, in fact, there are moments when she's very charming. In a way, i don't understand current critical standards (or the lack thereof). It's like the current critical animosity towards Jennifer Aniston: where is this coming from? But it's coming from the same mentality which Hollywood foists on everyone, in which there are winners and losers. So Angelina Jolie is a winner (especially because "Salt" was a success) and so Jennifer Aniston must be the loser. And one of the problems with critics now is that so many critics want to be insiders, they want to know who's on top in the Hollywood hierarchy, they want to back the winner.

It's kind of a hideous situation. And nobody wants to break the trend.

2010-08-14T07:30:00.000-07:00

More than a week, now in Santa Fe, quite disconcerting. I'm not sure if i'm the type who likes to commune with nature, and so though there are lovely sights and spectacular landscapes, it's rather lost on me.

Took the Georgia O'Keefe Ghost Ranch tour, it turned out to be more fun than i thought it would be, but it pointed out the problems that exist now in terms of critical standards. I still have to think about this, but it was illuminating to finally see "Work of Art" on TV. It was the final episode.

I think about this in relation to what i experienced in Berlin, and how the situation in terms of art has shifted. I forgot who said it (was it Dwight MacDonald?) but the statement was, "If all the cards are wild, you can't play poker." The reference was to "Touch of Evil" because the point was that the film was so outre that there seemed no semblance of "normality".

What standards are we using when we look at art? One of the jobs of critical commentary (it seems to me) is to articulate standards in relation to one's own aesthetic. But the idea of some universal aesthetic has been discredited, but it has not been replaced by anything which provides a general outline for cultural discourse.

We've reached the point where the individuation of taste has replaced any semblance of cultural continuity. So in place of a general culture, we have the preponderance of polls and "consensus" as a replacement. And this leads us to the point where "art" does, indeed, become a game show, and the standards of art are reduced to sound bytes and quips. Hey, wait: in some essay i wrote in the 1980s, didn't i describe the artworld as a variant of "Let's Make a Deal"? Well, my attempts at frivolity, at making a statement that was so preposterous it could never be "real", have come home to roost. But i'm not exactly crowing.

And so we see the result, a result where Georgia O'Keefe is lionized in Santa Fe, because her work now fits into critical paradigms (feminist, gender studies, etc.) which are currently fashionable, yet D. H. Lawrence (another cultural figure who staked out time in the area) is dismissed, because those same standards which hoisted O'Keefe have discredited Lawrence (dating back to Kate Millet's work). Yet am i wrong in thinking that "Sons and Lovers", "The Rainbow" and "Women In Love" remain among the finest works in the Anglo-American literary tradition? I could explain why i think that, but that would also assume an acknowledgement of where Lawrence fits in the British tradition, and the importance of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. It is not simply a matter of "if X and Y are good, then Z is also good" but an awareness of how Lawrence extended and amplified the aesthetic which Eliot and Hardy represented.

On another note: Reid Rosefelt had a wonderful post on his blog about Angelina Jolie, because i've tried to explain the same thing to people, i.e., how, if you had the chance to meet her when she was about 19 and just starting out, she had a vibrancy and an innate intelligence that bordered on ferocity. She seemed capable of doing almost anything. And no matter what she does now, she was a girl whose future seemed limitless. The only thing i wish is that she would take her acting more seriously. But she's the real deal: a genuine movie star, and she was that from the beginning.

2010-08-05T06:12:00.000-07:00

It's now almost a week since i've been home; was it really 9 and a half months away? I thought i would rush to movies, but have been catching up, spending time with my mother.

I'm glad that i went to the International Federation of Theater Research conference in Munich; for my last week in Germany, it proved to be very exciting. Not that i attended many of the sessions, but it was fascinating to see an organization in transition, really trying to become truly international, with scholars from Asia and Africa and Latin America, in addition to the usual Euro-American suspects. And the general meeting was fantastic: fractious, contentious, argumentative. It was a performance in itself. Who knew that the attempt to democratize the organization would be met with such resistance?

I'm happy to be back in time to see the annual TCM Summer Under the Stars: on Sunday, August 1st, watched "The Hound of the Baskervilles" and "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" with Basil Rathbone. On Monday, August 2nd, watched a bunch of movies with Julie Christie: "The Fast Lady", "Young Cassidy", "Billy Liar", "Darling". I can't believe it: this morning (Thursday, August 5th), i watched one of the Bomba the Jungle Boy movies ("African Treasure"; it's part of Woody Strode day, though his part was really small).

I couldn't watch "Work of Art": i tried, but it was so... aggravating. After a few minutes, i just had to get back to sanity, so i switched to "Psych". I still have to see "Hot in Cleveland".

There's so much to do, so much to see. NY1 just had a report about the waterfront parks in Brooklyn. Of course, today is another scorcher. I'm glad that this past weekend was relatively temperate, because otherwise, i'd be wondering why i came back.

But one thing i learned: i love New York. A lot of people wish they had been in NYC in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and i don't have to wish.

Now that i've said that, i have to say that coming back was a shock because of the sudden changes. Subway service is a shambles. I love the fact that the new notices in the subways (explaining why service is being cut) simply blame it on the budget crisis. But what a way to run a city!

2010-07-25T16:31:00.000-07:00

Well, two weeks in another town. More specifically, in my case, nine and a half months in another town, and now it's over. I've still got a week to go, but tomorrow i go to Munich for the IFTR (International Federation of Theater Research) Conference.

It's too soon to tell, but what did i learn from my experiences in Berlin? One thing is that i do not like solitary confinement; i do like having people around, i am very much a social animal, i've been used to having someone else there, ever since i was born. I don't make friends easily, i am not one of those gregarious happy people. And i tend to be very focused, but if my focus dovetails with other people's foci, then i'm fine.

I'll just give a run-down of this week. On Tuesday, there was the last session that i'll ever attend at the International Research Center: Zvika Serper talked about Japanese culture in terms of "interweaving" but he also discussed his training in Japanese classical theater traditions: No, Kabuki, Kyogen. Actually, this was quite fascinating; he discussed the Suzuki Method, and explained how there is no "method" in most Japanese traditional theater, the traditions were handed down from generation to generation but in the 20th Century this changed when the idea of dynastic families changed.

Then i had to meet about some university business.

Then i had dinner with Robin and Hannes. Very pleasant, at a place called Felix Austria.

Wednesday was the Center's Summer Party, a Barbeque in the Garden. The highlight was when the kids and staff (Armin, Claudia, Holger, Johanna and Silvia) performed. That was a lot of fun. I talked mostly with Gabriele Brandstetter, Franz Anton Cramer, Ludger Orlock, and Lina Saneh. I had a good time.

On Thursday, i went to the "Head" Exhibit at G11 Gallery, which is located in this abandoned wreck of a factory building on Landsberger Allee; it's one of those buyildings that's almost like a squat, but it's an artists' building. Theer are at least two galleries there, as well as several studios. Some artists are even living in the building. Baerbel had some pieces in the "Head" show; she's a sculptor, and her work is very good. She works in stone, and has a very secure touch in handling her materials. She was describing her method, how she likes to take the time to sand the stones, so that there is a really tactile sense. Then we went to have lunch. Well, i had lunch, she just wanted something to drink (juice). And we talked about the Berlin art scene. And that was really enjoyable, because a lot of my perceptions are the same as her experiences, and she's been in Berlin for four years.

When i got home, "Les Demoiselles de Rochefort" was on TFV, in the original French (with German subtitles). But it was letterboxed and it was lovely to see.

Friday, i handed in my keys. Nobody was around, but i said goodbye to Claudia; she is the new financial manager/administrator (she's been working at the Center since February).

Later, i met my friend Karen for dinner, at a South African restaurant; then we walked around Prenzlauer Berg. But our discussion centered on what "home" is: Karen is one of those people who has lived in a lot of places for extended periods of time (two years in Poland, almost as long in China, a period in India, and so on) whereas i'm someone who has basically stayed in New York City my whole life. So this Berlin adventure was a novelty for me, and i have no way to assess it.

On Saturday, i did my "dry-run" to the Hauptbahnhof, since i'll need to go there on Monday to catch my train to Munich. Turns out that i can take the Ubahn and then change for the Sbahn; altogether, it takes about 45 minutes.

Today, i was going to Potsdamer Platz, but the U2 wasn't running for a stretch; you had to take a bus. So i decided to skip it. Then i had dinner with Timothy.

And now i did the laundry (for the last time) and started packing and started throwing out a lot of the papers i collected. Now it's time to sleep. Tomorrow is another day....

2010-07-11T07:15:00.000-07:00

The research institutes that make up the "Kulturen des Performativen" at the Freie Universitat Berlin are coming to an end; it's a "project" that has lasted some six years, with a lot of people on the faculty of FU being able to do research projects instead of just teaching. So, to draw to a close or to celebrate (depending on one's point of view), the "Kulturen des Performativen" had a big conference held at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (which is the cultural center smack dab in the middle of the Tiergarten). There were many invited speakers from many disciplines, and it was a lot of fun (in a way). Am still mulling over many of the talks given by people, and also am amused by the behavior of some people. Elaine Scarry's talk, "Thinking in an Emergency", was quite provocative in trying to understand the abdication of law when faced with a catastrophic event, such as 9/11 or the recent Gulf Coast oil spill, in which the federal government and BP are colluding to curtail First Amendment rights. But the last day (Saturday, 10 July) brought some of the most entertaining lectures. The concluding session, with the anthropologist Johannes Fabian, and then with Judith Butler, provided much hilarity. Fabian because his scrupulously discursive auotobiographical talk (in which he analyzed the problematic of "theory" in anthropology in the 1970s, as the old model of anthropology in which the anthropologist is seen as an almost omniscent observer was challenged and critiqued) eventually led to his conclusion which was that the field of "Performance Studies" was itself flawed because of the inconsistent use of theoretical models. The silence in the auditorium after he spoke was deafening! Wow! An auditorium filled with Performance Studies academics, and he's telling them, you're full of crap. It doesn't get much better than that! Erika Fischer-Lichte tried to get him to grant that some of the research has proven valuable, but Fabian was insistent: if your work does not withstand theoretical rigor, how can it be useful?

Then Erika Fischer-Lichte introduced Judith Butler. Now, i have to admit, i felt a little... naughty? Because almost 20 years ago, when we were editing PAJ, we published what we thought was a wonderful article, which basically demolished Butler's theoretical pretensions, and also (and here was the salt-in-the-wound rub) detailed her diva-like behavior at conferences, etc. ("It's Judy at home, Judith in public": one of the classic lines!) Let me just say: Judith Butler did not disappoint! Still the same diva-bitch!

Listen: you can't get better entertainment. And on the day when Germany was going up against Uruguay for third place in the World Cup. As we all know (if you've been following the World Cup at all, and, yes, i did watch) Germany won, 3 to 2. Let me tell you: the vuvuzelas were deafening last night! Plus people were setting off firecrackers!

Performance Studies can be summed up: "The world is a stage/The stage is a world/Of entertainment!" (Cue Fred Astaire, Jack Buchanan, Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant dancing!) Now that IS entertainment!

2010-07-07T07:51:00.000-07:00

It's now 7 July, and i'm winding down my stay in Berlin. In the last weeks, i've had a lot of fun, and i've met some people, and had a good time. But i'm already thinking of what i want to do next. It really is time to leave.

My new friend Karen has stopped her blog, because she's trying to concentrate on her own writing. I think that's why people come to Berlin: it's a place to come when you need a break. It's a place to come when you're winded, and you need to regroup.

People come to Berlin for all sorts of reasons: that's what i learned at the Center. All the Fellows are people in different stages of their careers, and everyone is taking the opportunity to chill. What's the next step?

"There's a certain shade of limelight that can wreck a girl's complexion." That was one of the lines that George Axelrod wrote for Holly Golightly to say in "Breakfast at Tiffany's". In a very real sense, i've been wrecked, and i'm here trying to see if the pieces can be put together for me to start again.

One way i've done that has been Facebook. I know FB is just a silly social networking site, but i no longer have a neighborhood: once we moved, i'm no longer surrounded by people i know. And so i've found my old neighborhood online. I'm re-creating my life.

I don't like being alone: i think i always knew that, but, boy, it hit me once i was in Berlin. I was really alone, and it wasn't nice. I don't need to be alone: in fact, i can't work alone. I work best when i'm surrounded by people and there'a a lot of commotion. I thrive on having people around.

Oh, well, i've got to start thinking about what i need to do so i can leave here with no loose ends.

2010-06-26T01:57:00.000-07:00

I'm exhausted! The last two week have been filled with performances and lectures and art, and i'm finally having fun in Berlin and i'm finally meeting people. But now i'm tired.

Right now, i'm a little apprehensive about this lecture i'm supposed to give on Tuesday. It's supposed to be an hour, and it's about the Judson Dance Theater. Which is fine, except that my point of view is one which does not follow the now-prescribed official "history" of the Judson Dance Theater. That official history leaves out too much, and what i want to do with the students is to give them a chance to see how much more varied and multivalent and exciting the actual history of the Judson Dance Theater was. Not just to center it on the usual suspects ("Rauschenberg's babies" as Shigeko Kubota used to call them, i.e., Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Deborah Hay, Lucinda Childs, Trisha Brown) but let them know about Sally Gross, Carla Blank, June Ekman, Elaine Summers, Ruth Emerson, Beverly Schmidt, Eddie Barton, Freddy Herko... not just the dancers, and not just the artists (Rauschenberg, Robert Morris, Alex Hay, Carolee Schneemann, Robert Huot) but also the musicians like Phil Corner, Malcolm Goldstein, John Herbert MacDowell, and even some of the theater people who were involved, especially Roberts Blossom. I want to show how the Judson Dance Theater wasn't just related to the art scene of Minimalism, but also to (say) the off-off-Broadway scene (and very explicitly in the case of those two classic Al Carmines-Lawrence Kornfeld pieces based on Gertrude Stein, "What Happened" and "In Circles").

And not just all those people (and more) but Robert Ellis Dunn.

And suddenly i am flooded with memories, and it makes me a little sad.

2010-06-19T02:52:00.001-07:00

There's hardly a place in the world where we don't have some preconceptions. The mediation of media images infects everything: we've already seen Tokyo, we've already seen Prague, we've already seen Rome. If not in physical fact, at least in some facsimile which has given us the sense that we know something about the world.

So i have to say that, before coming to stay in Berlin for ten months, i had some preconceptions about Berlin. I had visited the city before (to attend the Berlinale more than a decade ago) and so i was familar with a few areas of the city (principally the area around Zoologischer Garten; at that time, the Zoo Palast was the central movie theater of the Berlinale, before the move to the newly built spaces at Potsdamer Platz). And here's where Berlin tricked me up: the other time i had come to the Berlinale, the press office people i dealt with were actually nice and helpful; this time, they were snooty and rude and obnoxious. Wow: who spiked the Kool-Aid? And this winter, i wasn't in the mood to deal with any more horrible behavior. I'd had enough of it all throughout my stay.

But the last few weeks, i've had a wonderful time in Berlin. And i can see why people love it. Ok, i've got to say this about the much-hyped art scene. It ain't happening. No, seriously. It's lively, but... i don't know. So far, i haven't found any rich people. I know that seems like a joke, but i was thinking about it. Even in New York City in the late 1940s, when someone like Jackson Pollock would use whatever money he had on paint and booze, so that he often couldn't pay his rent and had to flop with friends, there were still people like Peggy Guggenheim. And you always had trust-fund babies. Sure, Kerouac and Ginsberg weren't rolling in dough, but William Burroughs was a trust-fund baby. Even with avantgarde filmmakers. Bruce Baillie always needed jobs or grants, and even then, he had to live on the bare minimum, but Warren Sonbert and even Jack Smith were trust-fund babies.

It's like with Bruce, if he was in town, maybe you'd meet up with him at a cheapo Chinese restaurant, and if he had been teaching or something like that, and had a little money, he'd pick up the tab. But sometimes, you knew he didn't have the money, so you picked up the tab, and he was always grateful but it was no big deal. With Warren, if he called and he was in town, you knew you'd go to a really nice, fancy restaurant, you didn't have to worry about what you ordered and you knew he'd take care of the bill. That was the deal.

But Warren was very scrupulous about that fact: he knew that other people didn't have the resources he had, and so he never applied for grants. Ever. He felt that people like Bruce or Ernie Gehr, who needed the grants, didn't need him as competition. For them, grant money was crucial, for him, it wouldn't have made a difference, so that was that. Just as long as his work was appreciated (i remember when Paul Arthur wrote something about Warren's films - was it in The Downtown Review? - and Warren was so pleased, all throughout dinner, Warren kept showing us the piece because he was so happy that Paul was able to write so perceptively about the films), Warren was fine.

And i did what i could. There was the time i was one of the advisors on a series that was sponsored by PBS... it was a series of programs featuring short films which dealt with American filmmakers who had made films about "foreign" cultures. My job was to suggest films. There was a whole agenda which had been given to us, so we knew the criteria. And two filmmakers i suggested were Bruce and Warren. And both were chosen. For Bruce, the money that he got for the film turned out to be really important: that was when his wife was pregnant, and the money turned out to be a "blessing-in-disguise" because they were able to use the money to pay the medical expenses (the hospital stay for the birth, etc.); for Warren, he was thrilled at the prospect of the film getting a broader audience, at the honor of being included in this prestigious series, but the money wasn't that important.

But i always did what i could. (Hell, i even helped Jack Smith get the only grant he ever got in his life!) I tried to find ways of using the system so that artists really could get some help from it.

But everything's changed. It's not that easy. The systems that were set up are on the verge of extinction. So in a very real sense, i came to Berlin to recharge my batteries. And then i got hit by the toughest winter ever. And now it's the summer, and i'm getting ready to leave, and yet finally there was the thaw, and Berlin does seem to be in bloom.

2010-06-01T02:25:00.001-07:00

Haven't posted anything in about three weeks, and one reason is that i've actually been sightseeing in Berlin.

On Tuesday, May 11, i went to the O2 Stadium, to see the Lady Gaga Monster Ball Tour. Lady Gaga has sold out every venue in Europe... except Berlin! The mayor of Berlin was quoted last year as saying that Berlin was poor but sexy. Scratch the sexy, Berlin is definitely poor. The problem with the Lady Gaga tour was that the tour was also hitting Munich and Hamburg: the prices for tickets had to be the same, otherwise no one would have bought tickets for Munich or Hamburg, they would just have bought the cheap tickets in Berlin and come over by train. Berlin couldn't afford the prices, so only about 3/4 of the O2 Stadium was sold. (In Dublin, the tickets sold out in about three hours, and another date was added, which also sold out; Dublin is just as cash-strapped as Berlin, but in Dublin, they know what they like, and they'll shell out for the tickets.) Anyway, it was quite the show, it lasted 2 1/2 hours, so i didn't get back until almost midnight.

But i had to wake up so i could meet Christine and Steve at the airport. I checked online, and the website said that the plane was on schedule, but when i got to the airport, that wasn't the case: there was a two-hour delay, which gave me time to rush back to a supermarket and pick up stuff like bottled water (the tap water is hard in Berlin) so that Christine and Steve would have things. Their hotel would probably have bottled water, but it would cost an arm and a leg (actually: 5 Euros as opposed to... less than .50 Euro including bottle deposit). I thought that i'd meet them, we'd go to their hotel, they'd check in and then want to relax: shower, nap, whatever. And i thought i'd meet them later and we'd go to a restaurant. But no: Christine was rearing to go! After we dropped off their bags, we spent six hours walking around Berlin! Six hours! I was exhausted! I haven't walked that much in Berlin... ever!

But it was fun, and it made Berlin seem like a city that had a lot to see.

Maybe it does. But that was May 12, and it's been one long sightseeing tour since then with a break to go to the Performing Tangier 2010 Conference.

And now it's the first of June, and it's back to work, such as it is. By the way: i wish people would stop sending me comments that are in languages that i don't read. I refuse to post anything in any language but English. So if you're trying to send me comments in languages other than English (and you know who you are, and you're not anybody i know), i refuse to post them, and so you might as well stop! (And i should add that when this first happened, Weiji Yu from Singapore was still at the Center, and i asked him if he'd look at this comment i received, and he told me, oh, it's an ad for sex. So please stop!)

2010-05-10T12:52:00.001-07:00

Shock and not-quite-awe. It has been a week of incredible stress: on Monday, 3 May, Esiaba Irobi died. He had been at the International Research Center since November; he had been part of the opening panel discussion of the Think Tank: Identity Politics at the Dahlem Humanities Center on Thursday, 8 April, and then gave a lecture as part of the symposium the day after. He was working feverishly, almost as if he were trying to defy the inevitable. When he came to Berlin, he had just finished his treatments for cancer; he didn't want to wait to see if the cancer was, in fact, in remission. He wanted so badly to start a new life, to find some intellectual excitement, which he didn't feel he was getting where he was teaching. But by December, the cancer had returned, and he was struggling with treatments and fatigue. And now, it's over, though so many problems remain. His wife is facing massive problems: there is the house in Ohio, there is the situation of his first wife and son in London, where will the funeral be held? The last has been decided: the funeral will happen in Nigeria, but that means arrangements have to be made to repatriate the body. But i have to say that everyone at the Center has really stepped up to the plate, as it were, and they have been incredibly helpful and supportive and decisive. That much is very impressive.

I just received the news that Callie Angell has died. I'm really in shock: i've known Callie for 40 years. It's the 40th Anniversary of the founding of Anthology Film Archives, and Callie was the first librarian there. Callie was the librarian, Linda Patton was... i forgot what her title actually was, it would be something like Executive Director, though i'm not sure if it was that. Jonas Mekas (of course) was the director (Artistic Director, whatever). I saw Callie in October, when she was here for Live Film! Jack Smith! at the Kino Arsenal and the HAU. She seemed to have problems: her legs were very swollen. It turned out that she was battling diabetes, and, in this case, it was a losing battle.

I'm very sad, because she's one of the people that was part of that first period of what i guess i would call my career: Jonas Mekas, P. Adams Sitney, Linda Patton, Robert Polidori, Ric Stanberry, and Callie were the staff of Anthology Film Archives, and Donald Richie, Adrienne Mancia, Larry Kardish, Eileen Bowser, and Charles Silver were the staff at The Museum of Modern Art's Department of Film. Robert Polidori has a photo exhibit here in Berlin which opened over the weekend; the notice i got didn't indicate an official opening, but i planned to see the show.

When i first met Callie, she had frizzy hair and thick eyeglasses, rather like Anne Hathaway at the beginning of "The Princess Diaries". But then, when i saw her again after many years (by that point, she'd become the curator for the Andy Warhol Film Archives, which is a joint project of The Whitney Museum and The Museum of Modern Art, funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation), she'd cut her hair and it was white, and she wasn't wearing those thick glasses anymore. But she was really dedicated, and there were so many interconnections with Warhol's films and the work of other filmmakers. I can't even imagine that this happened. There really isn't that much time. Warhol (of course) used real time in his films, but even that wasn't enough for time to have a stop.

2010-05-07T05:29:00.000-07:00

I'm just sitting here, and i'm losing money fast, because the Euro is going down in relation to the dollar. When i arrived here in Berlin, the exchange rate for the Euro was about $1.45; now, it dipped below $1.30 (it's currently $1.27). I have no idea what to do.

But one thing: i'm here in Berlin, no matter what. And with the better weather, it's a much better Berlin. There's actually a sense of things happening here. Gallery Weekend Berlin proved to be enjoyable (even if running into people was a mixed bag); there's a whole theater festival going on now. There are a lot of museum exhibits which have opened. Berlin really is a city where there is a lot to do. You just have to decide what you're interested in.

One thing Berlin has done for me is to reawaken my interest in film. Of course, i'm always interested in film, but in the last decade, i've mostly stuck to screenings at festivals or press screenings, and, since i'm not someone on the radar of the major studios, most of the press screenings i get invited to are for independent, foreign or documentary films. Which is fine, but here in Berlin, i've actually been going to the movies: in Potsdamer Platz, there is the Cinestar Sony Center, and it shows American and English movies in "OV" (original version) and so i've seen "The Ghost Writer", "Alice in Wonderland", "It's Complicated", "Date Night", "Greenberg" and others. One thing: the Cinestar is rarely ever crowded, so it's a nice feeling, like you can stretch out. (The Sony Center multiplex is only one out of seven in Berlin, so the others basically pay for the Sony Center; also: the Sony Center is where the IMAX and 3-D theaters are, and those are always crowded.) You know: would i actually go to see "Date Night" if i were home? Probably not, but i had a good time. The Kino Arsenal has had some exemplary retrospectives: when i arrived in October, the Kino Arsenal had its whole Live Film! Jack Smith! program, and then it's had retrospectives of the Dardenne Brothers, Antonioni, Dreyer, and (this month) John Ford, as well as focus series on current directors, such as Brilliante Mendoza and Lisandro Alonso. And when you've seen a good Dreyer movie, it's hard not to love movies all over again.

So i'm actually starting to have a good time. One thing is that i'm still feeling rather isolated, but people are starting to come into Berlin, so i'll have friends visiting and what more could i ask for?

However, i've been riveted by all this coverage on the British election: what does it all mean? It's now a hung Parliament.

2010-05-02T08:09:00.000-07:00

Berlin is, after all, only a city, but it continues to throw me. Just when i'm starting to have a good time, i get kicked in the head again.

Case in point: Gallery Weekend Berlin. This is a weekend (Friday, 30 April to Sunday, 2 May) when over 40 galleries/art spaces/exhibition centers had openings and stayed open for three afternoons. Many friends and acquaintances are involved in shows, so i expect to see people i know. Ok, so far so... Berlin.

Right off the bat, we've got a problem: Damian Hirst and Michael Joo are collaborating on a show at Haunch of Venison (what a name!), which is Christie's gallery. But where is it? I look it up on Google Maps and on Berlin.de, and find out... it's NOT located anywhere near an Ubahn or Sbahn station! How do you get to this place? Obviously, if you're a Christie's customer, by limo! Otherwise, inaccessible. Ok, so scratch Michael Joo off my list, i'm not going to be seeing him this weekend.

So on Friday, i hem and haw and finally decide to go to Veneklasen Werner to see "Self Consciousness", described as "a project co-curated by artist Peter Doig and writer Hilton Als". Ok, so i finally get my tired carcass up to Veneklasen Werner, and Hilton seems delighted to see me. And we reminisce a little about Owen Dodson, and Hilton asks me to stop by the next day at 1, and maybe we'll be able to have lunch. I actually hadn't intended to go back to that neighborhood, since i was going to check out the galleries where the KW Institute for Contemporary Art is, and go to the talks by Julia Scher and Elaine Sturtevant, but, ok.

So i show up at Veneklasen Werner at 1 o'clock... and no Hilton. I walk around a little, i go to other galleries in the neighborhood (including Galerie Barbara Thumm, which has a terrific little Jo Baer show; i speak to Barbara Thumm about Baer's career, and how it's only now that Baer's minimalist work from the 1960s is getting the recognition it deserved, but her work from the 1990s and the 2000s is very different), and keep coming back, but by 1:55 PM, i figure it's a no-show, and it's time for me to head onto KW.

But getting there turns out to be a madhouse: the Ubahn is as crowded as the Tokyo subways at rush hour. People are just squeezing in. What's happening?

Turns out (i didn't realize it) but May Day is a huge holiday in Germany. No one told me. (More on this later.)

But i get to KW Institute for Contemporary Art. I walk into some of the galleries, then wind up at KW. It's through a courtyard, and then there's a little sign that L'ecole de Stephanie (which is what the series is called) is on the fourth floor. Fourth floor? This place is very handicap-inaccessible. But then, most places in Berlin are.

So i wind up getting up to the fourth floor, and damn near break my neck on the stupid little fence in the doorway (i shall find out it's fenced in because of the rabbit - don't ask). The place is covered with hay (which is what you're supposed to sit on), and i'm trying to see if i can find Julia. (How long has it been since i've seen her? Again, don't ask.) So i see a bunch of women setting up... but i don't recognize anyone. And no wonder, since none of them was Julia. When she comes in, i recognize her, and she recognizes me! So another one of these kissy-huggy moments.

Then Julia gives her lecture, which is funny but a little rambling. But i try to get some information (what is she doing later? does she want to go to dinner later?) but Julia is busy doing the art-schmooz bit. Ok. Elaine Sturtevant is brought in: people had to help her climb the stairs, because she's in her 80s and it's not easy. I stay around for the beginning of her talk, but the hay is starting to get to me: i'm starting to itch. So i leave.

And then i realize: i was blown off again! Twice in one day!

This is too much! But i decide that i should look at more galleries in the neighborhood, and i do, and by 6 i'm ready to leave. I come back, and i watch "The Screening Room" (is that on CNN or BBC? Which network has the program "Talking Pictures"?); it's a Ray Harryhausen episode. So then i decide it's time to go to the supermarket and get some food.

And i go to Rewe, to find... it's closed! I go to Kaiser's, and find... it's closed! May Day is a BIG holiday in Germany! I didn't realize this. I think maybe i'll have dinner at the little Japanese restaurant at Rudesheimer Platz, only to find... it's closed! What is open?

Well, i figure that the Chinese restaurant Dschunke must be open. You know: the Jewish Christmas tradition. But it's a bit of a walk. But i decide to risk it. So i walk, to discover... i was right, Dschunke is open! So i'm able to have dinner!

Thank goodness. But i'm feeling very uneasy, because i was blown off twice in a day. It's very disconcerting. It reminds me of most of the experiences i've had in Berlin: hideously rude, downright nasty, totally crass. Like... my experience at the Berlin Film Festival! The problem is that i'm always looking forward to things: i was looking forward to the Berlin Film Festival, i was looking forward to Gallery Weekend Berlin, and then, it wasn't just my hopes were dashed, it was also that i was insulted in the bargain. Yeah, yeah, yeah, everyone has an excuse, but why does everyone have to be rude? People used to say that New York City was a rude city, but New York has nothing on the absolute boorishness of Berlin.

So today is Sunday, and i just couldn't drag myself to see anything. I should have gone to see the Michael Snow exhibit at the Klosterfelde Gallery, and i should have gone to the opening of James Benning's "American Dreams" exhibit at the Kino Arsenal. I should have gone to Sylvere Lotringer's lecture at KW Institute of Contemporary Art. But i couldn't do it: i couldn't deal with possibly seeing people, because i'm feeling very anti-social.

Berlin has made me a very anti-social person.

And after dinner last night, i was watching TV (as usual: CNN and BBC, the two big English-language networks) and then there started to be reports about the bomb scare in Times Square. And when i woke up, i was watching the CNN coverage of the Times Square car bomb for hours (at least until noon, and i started watching at 7:30 AM).

And the oil spill in the Gulf Coast is beyond depressing. This could destroy the coastlines of Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Florida. And (like Hurricane Katrina) the government response has been far too slow.

Plus now there are tornados in the area.

The southeast of the US is simply being destroyed.

So the rudeness to me is merely a blip in terms of the horrendous events going on all over, but still, such rudeness is very hurtful. And boy, Berlin knows how to hurt!

2010-04-25T16:12:00.000-07:00

Friday and Saturday, it finally hit me: i'm not going anywhere! I'm stuck in Berlin! Unfortunately, this was not good news, and i got hugely depressed about the whole thing. It's not just that there were all the screenings i wanted to get to, it was also just seeing my family and friends. It's been four months since Christmas: i've never been out of New York City for longer than three months at a time before. And now that i've cancelled my trip back (i would have had to rebook my flight for this week, which would leave me less than a week), it looks like i won't get home before the end of this particular sojourn (which ends in July). Who would have thought that a volcano in Iceland could cause such disruption?

But today (Sunday), i decided to try to shake this. I cleaned (vacuumed and dusted), i went to the exercise room, i went to a movie ("The Young Victoria"; i enjoyed it, but i'm a sucker for Emily Blunt), i did my laundry.

One thing i did to try to get me in a writing mood was to go to IMDB and look at the Classic Film Board; unfortunately, i think i offended some people. In fact, i know i offended some people. The reason? One thing i hate is this whole so-and-so should have won an Academy Award/so-and-so shouldn't have won an Academy Award. Does it matter? What's done is done, and how people voted is how people voted. It's actually more interesting to look at who won, and try to figure out why. But it started with a thread on George Chakiris. The question was: are there any fans out there? And instead of people talking about George Chakiris, there were all these comments about how he shouldn't have won an Academy Award for his supporting performance in "West Side Story". But he did win, and i remember at the time, it seemed to be a pretty popular choice, it was part of the juggernaut that was "West Side Story".

But people get bent out of shape about the Academy Awards, and i can't understand why. If you're not a member, what does it matter what the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences decides? There are over 6,000 members (i don't remember the exact number), and the MPAAS is topheavy with veteran show biz types. Once you're a member, you're a member for life (just as long as you pay your yearly dues). So the only way i can take the Academy Awards is as a joke.

But i think i got some people angry, because they take the Academy Awards very seriously.

But it doesn't matter, because i'm stuck in Berlin.

2010-04-20T01:06:00.001-07:00

What a mess! I was supposed to leave Berlin on Friday, April 16, to get back to New York City. Well, who knew that a volcano eruption in Iceland was going to throw all air travel in a tailspin? So here i am in Berlin (Tuesday, April 20) and i'm not sure what's happening. I keep watching CNN or BBC and listening to the reports about this crisis (and it is a crisis!) and wondering what to do. I've been rebooked for a flight tomorrow morning but how many transatlantic flights are leaving from Berlin? I'm thinking about cancelling and just waiting until things calm down. And i'm hoping that the situation will calm down.

Everything seemed to be on track to restart air travel, but then, last night, the volcano erupted again and sent another plume of volcanic ash in the direction of London. So English airspace is once again in peril and that's causing all sorts of problems. Test flights are now underway but London has kept its airports closed.

That's it right now. But i'm not trapped and i'm not stuck: i have a place here in Berlin and i have things to do (there are talks, etc. at the Center) and i can wait it out. But this better not last through the summer, because by July, i've got to get home, and home is not Berlin!

2010-04-15T08:28:00.001-07:00

On Monday, April 12, 2010, Werner Shroeter died. Of all the filmmakers of Das Neue Kino, he was just about my favorite. Not that he had the most consistent career. But at his best, he was responsible for some of the most ecstatic images in the German cinema. Two of my favorite films of his were "The Death of Maria Malibran" and "The Rose King". But he's another filmmaker whose work remains now in the limbo of the obscure, because his films are not available on DVD.

Speaking of ecstatic images, two recent viewings: Tom Ford's "A Single Man" and the Rene Pollesch stage production of "Maedchen in Uniform". Since i've seen these two works, i've been thinking about the whole issue of gay representation, because these two works take "canonical" works of gay culture (Christopher Isherwood's novel, published in 1964, and Christa Winsloe's play, first produced in 1930) and present them in a context of post-Stonewall sensibilities. It is not that the works are "updated"; in fact, in both cases, they are not, they are kept in period. But the changes brought to the original texts point to a different approach to questions of openness and visibility vis-a-vis being gay.

I really want to think more about this, and write about this in greater detail. But one great start is Michael O'Sullivan's consideration of Ford's film "A Single Man" which can be found on his blog (http://www.osullivan60.blogspot.com); it is an excellent examination of the changes that Ford made to the original novel, and also an appreciation for what Ford has done with the film. I should also add that Colin Firth's performance is just one of the most subtle and moving performances i've seen. Plus Tom Ford has made Matthew Goode and Nicholas Hoult and Jon Kortajarena so beautiful it hurts!

2010-04-12T06:33:00.001-07:00

The past few days have been probably the best (so far) of my sojourn in Berlin.

To start: on Thursday, went to the morning session of the Dahlem Humanities Center (another institute here at the Freie Universitat) for the opening of Think Tank: Identity and Identity Politics. Ok, a lot of it was a snooze, but there were amusing moments. The panelists for the opening session included Akeel Bilgrami (who is a professor of philosophy at Columbia University), Gulsen Celebi (who is a lawyer dealing with immigration issues in Germany), Luis Costa Lima (comp-lit professor at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro), Dan Diner (director of the Simon-Dubnow-Instituts in Leipzig), Ufuk Topkara (historian with The Jewish Museum Berlin), Eun-Jeung Lee (East Asian scholar, specializing in Korean studies), Homi Bhabha (now at Harvard), Esiaba Irobi (Ohio University) with Joachim Kupper of the Dahlem Humanities Center as the moderator. A lot of the rhetoric about identity was (shall we say) dated, but when Homi Bhabha came in and basically said that these kinds of forums have been going on for years and it's time to move on, you thought that a real spark was going to ignite. It didn't quite, but Homi Bhabha and Esiaba Irobi were really funny: it was like a high-brow (maybe not that high) version of Martin and Lewis. But they never really broke loose and went all out crazy (like Jerry Lewis at his most frenzied). But still, they gave an indication that there was a way to have fun with the topic.

Friday, went to the Kino Arsenal to see Marguerite Duras's "India Song". The print was in good shape, and it was (again) a mesmerizing and entrancing experience. But i liked the fact that, since i've been here in Berlin and so much of the discussion has been about the post-colonial experience of culture, this film was such a striking example of a colonial mindset, even as it interrogates that mindset.

Saturday was the "Long Night of Opera and Theater". The thing was: you bought a ticket (for 15 Euros) and that allowed you to go to as many performances at as many venues as you could cram in. There was a book that gave you a schedule: most places had performances every two hours, or every hour, and you could try to go from one place to another. Of course, it's all spread out, so you had to pick and choose... i went with Ramona Mosse, who is another Fellow here at the Center, and we tried to start at 7 (when most theaters began their evening). We started at the HAU, because the company performing was Forced Entertainment, a troupe from Sheffield, England. Ramona decided (rightly) since i'm not fluent in German, we should start with an English-language entertainment. From there, we went to the Maxim Gorki Theater, which was an imposing building; Ramona mentioned that the company has become one which seems to adapt classic movies into stage plays. For this evening, they were showing scenes from their version of John Cassavetes's "Opening Night", a film with which i am very familiar. Then we went to the Staatsoper, where we saw students doing excerpts from classic operas. One problem: the students seemed to be stuck in the 1930s, giving florid gestures and overemoting to their every utterance. Then we saw Vocalconsort Berlin, a baroque choral group. They performed at the Konzerthaus Berlin, which is kind of like Berlin's Carnegie Hall. The acoustics were spectacular; this was a very pleasing event. Then we decided to try the Admiralspalast, which is a concert venue. The attraction on this night was Mark Scheibes Berlin Revue; Scheibe is one of those performers who sits at a piano and makes jokes between songs. We caught the Comedy Block; there was a couple doing improv (part of their schtik was that they would start a story, and then ask the audience for the next word or line...; at one point, you could tell that the woman was getting fed up, as if to say, enough with the fart jokes!) and a comedian who billed himself as "the Jew". I'm not kidding. We ended the evening by going to Ballhaus Ost, which was a performance center where different choreographers were supposed to be doing "ritual performances". By the time we got there, one of the performances was just getting out, but the other one that was still going on seemed reminiscent of so much of the East Village dance scene of the 1970s.

But it was also fascinating to see the different crowds. Initially, things seemed sparse in terms of the audience, but by 9 o'clock, every venue we went to was packed, and the differences in the audiences proved to be very amusing. Places like the HAU and Ballhaus Ost had crowds that skewed younger: people in their 20s, the hip crowd, slightly grungy. At places like the Staatsoper and the Konzerthaus, a lot of families, but also a lot of older people, people coming for their high culture.

I'm still processing the whole evening, but it was wonderful, a real Berlin experience.

I got home after 1 AM and so i tried to sleep in on Sunday morning, but when i turned on the TV, one of the stations was showing "Grand Hotel". Ok, dubbed in German, but i think i know that movie. But it was wonderful to see John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, and (of course) Garbo. In terms of the dubbing: i'm pretty sure that Garbo did her own dubbing, since she did her own German dialogue in the German version of "Anna Christie" which Jacques Feyder directed. I posted the fact that i watched this on Facebook, and Scott Marks (who has the website Emulsion Compulsion) made a comment that "Grand Hotel" may not have been such a great movie after all. As if it ever was? Nobody in their right mind would think "Grand Hotel" was even a good movie. But it's a deluxe piece of engineered entertainment, it's smoothly directed, and it has movie stars. That's it. Sometimes you don't want great art, sometimes you just want (almost) mindless entertainment, but you get to look at Greta Garbo (and Joan Crawford) in their prime, when they were two of the most glamorous women in the world.

Then i did go to a "work of art": Lisandro Alonso's first feature, "La Libertad". Stylistically, it was a rather rigid example of a minimalist aesthetic. But it proved to be a haunting movie. I'm still trying to think about the movie, but it did give me something to think about, and i do think that Alonso (on the strength of "Los Muertos", "Liverpool" and this movie) is one of the finest young directors now at work.

2010-04-08T04:29:00.000-07:00

Some recent entries on other people's blogs have made me feel as if there really is the possibility of intelligent discourse. Michael O'Sullivan continues to inform us of his delight in English and American and European cinema of the 1940s through the 1960s. Ed Howard (on his blog Only the Cinema, i.e., www.seul-le-cinema.blogspot.com) has written with great relish about Franju's "Nuits Rouges" and it made that film's (seemingly obvious) flaws into crazy virtues. Plus a while ago, he wrote a great piece about Ron Rice's "Chumlum".

I just came back from a conference on Identity Politics held at the Dahlem Humanities Center here at the Freie Universitat Berlin. It was sometimes lively, but mostly dreary. Why does academia tend to dry up the lifeblood of even the most impassioned topics?

The news has been startling: landslides in Brazil, an earthquake in Peru, mining disasters in China and the US, and the dissolution of Parliament in Great Britain. I'm sure there's more. But it makes you realize that BBC News does cover the world in a way that news in the US no longer does. What does that insularity mean for the US?

2010-04-04T12:20:00.000-07:00

Easter Sunday. 2010 will stand as a very dissociated year for me. It has been hard to concentrate, let alone write. Yet i have seen a number of things since the last time i blogged. At least two art openings: the group exhibit "Woodman, Woodman, Spare That Tree" at Galerie Micky Schubert, and the opening night of the "Squatting" show at the Temporare Kunsthalle. Ok, what was my take on the art scene? Well: it's an art scene, a lot of younger people, the Temporare Kunsthalle was packed, but what about the art? My impression so far: there is a feeling that a lot of the work is warmed over, it's very much like the art found in the Chelsea galleries a decade ago: there was a sense of deja vu, the artists are proficient and they have done their homework in terms of the post-modern, conceptual basis for their work, but it's not really that exciting. Maybe i'm just jaded. But i did like the fact that there were all these people milling around at these openings.

Saw the program of shorts by Carl Theodor Dreyer at the Kino Arsenal. Impeccable craftsmanship! Still, most of the films were jobs: for the Ministry of Health, for the Ministry of Culture, for the Safety Council, etc. The one short in the program that transcended this was "They Chased the Ferry"; i'd seen that film before (many times) but it's still marvellous.

But seeing a few of Dreyer's films really excited me. It was fascinating to witness the development of a true style in film. But it's also instructive. One film which was shown in the series was Gustaf Molander's 1943 version of "Ordet"; it was startling because, though Molander adhered closer to the text, you realized how radically Dreyer transformed his source material. In the Molander, there are whole subplots and characters which Dreyer simply eliminates. Dreyer concentrates his narrative, as his style creates a visual concentration (which became apparent in "La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc"), and his final two films ("Ordet" and "Gertrud") show how he wanted to work in an almost bare visual field.

I'm also reading Tony Pipolo's "Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film", which i think is excellent. It reminds me of a discussion i had with someone once, now i'm forgetting who the otehr person was, but we were discussing filmmakers like Dreyer, Bresson, Mizoguchi, Ozu, i.e., filmmakers whose cultures were "foreign" to us (for example, i remember that neither of us was Catholic) and how the way to deal with those films was on a formal level, that form would reveal the content to us critically.

And that's what i was thinking of with Dreyer, although what's become intriguing in terms of Dreyer scholarship is the continual unfolding of Dreyer's biography. And to think that, in the 196os, when i first started seeing Dreyer's movies, there seemed to be virtually nothing known about the man. The whole story of his mother giving him up for adoption, his mother's suicide a little while after, and the rigidly devout couple that raised him... these were facts that nobody really knew. So our understanding of his work could not be considered in terms of his biography.

The recent fracas between Armond White and J. Hoberman (with "Greenberg" as the bone of contention) was dismaying, for so many reasons. Ok, so i should say that i know both of them, and they're people who have strong opinions, but there was something very distressing because it pointed to a breakdown of communication. On a fundamental level, we're not talking about the same things.

We claim that we're talking about movies, but our definitions are different. Armond retains a belief in the cinema as a mass medium, that at its best movies represent an art which unites the broadest possible audience. And to give weight to his argument, he points to Spielberg as an example. Hoberman has long championed the alternative cinema; it's not for nothing that he was initially seen as the Village Voice's successor to Jonas Mekas. "Greenberg", if you will, is an example of shall we say niche cinema. And Armond has a violent antipathy to what he views as elitist cinema, and Hoberman is a defender of the small-market film, just as he champions small-guage cinema.

But i think i should see "Greenberg".

2010-03-25T06:08:00.001-07:00

Amazing! In the last few days, a lot of friends have been awfully busy: their blogs are just filled with goodies.

Michael O'Sullivan (www.osullivan60.blogspot.com) has written about his favorite Kay Kendall, as well as wonderful little travelogues on Kerry and on Rhodes, complete with enticing photos. Joe Baltake (www.thepassionatemoviegoer.blogspot.com) has written about Robert Altman's "H.E.A.L.T.H." and Hilary Brougher's "Stephanie Daley"; Kevin Lee (www.alsolikelife.com) has written a little report about the Berlinale, and (surprisingly) his conclusions were the same as mine, in that he found the most exciting items at this year's festival to be the Yasujiro Shimazu films, and the Forum Expanded installations.

Reading all these people, i feel like there are really a lot of possibilities for fresh perspectives on the arts, especially movies.

2010-03-17T14:09:00.000-07:00

BBC News has some disturbing images of the demonstrations in Bangkok where people have spilled blood as a protest on the current government. This morning, there were reports on the cyclone hitting Fiji; this is the third catastrophic storm Fiji has had since January, and the images are just so sad.

CNN had a lot on the scandal of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church; Christianne Amanpour devoted her show to trying to figure out why the Catholic Church is so culpable in this matter. Now, BBC News has a little segment on Haiti and how the entire prison system has been destroyed in Port-au-Prince. And (of course) when the prisons fell apart, the guards ran for their lives, and the prisoners just ran.

The various discussions on the abuse scandal in the Irish Catholic Church brings me to "The Lovely Bones". I went to see it this afternoon (i probably would have given it a miss, but it was playing here and at least two people said it was interesting), and i understand why Peter Jackson was attracted to the material; there are similarities to "Heavenly Creatures" in that there are all these fantasy sequences and a horrific act. In "Heavenly Creatures", the fantasies lead up to the horrific act; in "The Lovely Bones", the story begins with the horrific act, and then there are all those fantasy sequences. That may seem to be a quibbling detail, but it's not: the story arc in "Heavenly Creatures" gradually builds, the apprehension is a slow process, the initial fantasies are exhilarating. But in "The Lovely Bones", the movie starts to seem unbalanced as the fantasy overwhelms the painful narrative.

Though i didn't think it worked, i was glad i saw "The Lovely Bones" and i think it was an honorable try by Peter Jackson. Jackson's problem is that he has developed this extraordinary technical mastery, especially in regards to CGI and special effects, but what is it good for? The meeting of Jackson's technical skills (and the skills of his amazing crew of special effects artists in New Zealand) with the mythological narrative of J.R.R. Tolkein was a match made in heaven, but now what?

And some material may, in fact, be intractable. Something similar seems to have happened with Michael Winterbottom's "The Killer Inside Me", rather reminiscent of Wittgenstein's dictum, "Everything that can be thought can be thought clearly, everything that can be said can be said clearly, but not everything that can be thought can be said." That is: some books deal with extreme subject matter, but when a movie shows you some of these things, is it appropriate for viewing?

It's hard to explain. For example: i remember watching Oshima's "In the Realm of the Senses" and getting thrown out of the framework of the movie whenever the sex got really graphic, yet i can watch porn with no problem. What's the difference? But there is a difference, and that difference made me uncomfortable watching "In the Realm of the Senses".

Can everything be made into a movie? But doesn't it depend on the way it's made?

2010-03-15T15:54:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, when i log in, i wind up reading the blogs that i follow: Reid Rosefeld's "Speedcine: My Life As a Blog", George Robinson's "Cine-Journal", Joe Baltake's "The Passionate Moviegoer", Arthur S.'s "This Pig's Alley", Michael O'Sullivan's reviews and comments, Iain Stott's "One-Line Film Reviews". And there are other blogs and online sites: IndieWire, Carrie Rickey's blog, Anne Thompson's blog. After a certain point, you just start reading and it's very enticing, and i often feel that i don't really have anything to add.

I have to say: i loved Arthur S.'s analysis of Kiju Yoshida's "Kaigenrei", it's a wonderful close reading of that film, but he's done a similarly detailed critique of Fuller's "Run of the Arrow". Joe Baltake's round-up of the March offerings on Turner Classic Movies begins with his tribute to Ginger Rogers, as he notes, she was always more than just Fred Astaire's dance partner, but one of the most accomplished comediennes of the 1930s. Reid Rosefeld has been having fun lately, and his latest missive about plagarism in film criticism is hilarious.

George Robinson noted this year's IRA Awards; i'm sorry that i had to miss it, but an ocean is a lot to cover. And i didn't hand in a ballot, because i'm a little tired out in terms of the best of 2009.

But i wanted to commend Michael O'Sullivan on his review of the Tom Ford film "A Single Man"; Michael is very clear abouit the changes that Ford has wrought on Christopher Isherwood's original, but Michael also explains how this is an interpretation, and why he considers it a valid interpretation.

Now i'm watching CNN, reporting on the current problems in Haiti as the country tries to rebuild. Now there's a report on the damage done by the nor'easter: parts of Connecticut still have no electricity, power lines are down, it's very dangerous as the live wires remain a possible source of shock or fire.

Sports news has been abuzz about David Beckham's injury and the fact that he won't be able to play in the World Cup.

I've got to start getting focused on writing, but i also want to see a lot of movies. This weekend i saw "Crazy Heart" and i do understand the accolades for Jeff Bridges's performance.

But today was a little insane: snow and winds during the afternoon. If it just rained, maybe i could deal with it, but snow? Again? When does it stop?

2010-03-08T15:48:00.001-08:00

Another earthquake? Woke up to BBC News reporting on a 6 earthquake in the eastern part of Turkey. The aftershocks brought more damage. Haiti, then Chile, now Turkey. In a horrible way, there is a sense of becoming inured to the devastation.

The election in Iraq seems to point to the possibility of political (as opposed to military) solutions to the division of that nation. But the point is: why was there US military action in the first place? What was the goal? What did the Bush administration hope to achieve?

Of course, even the BBC news had a big wrap-up of the Academy Awards; the telecast got mixed reviews (to put it mildly), but most people seemed to agree that something historic had happened. But the focus was on Kathryn Bigelow. However, that was only part of the story. Not just that a woman won as Best Director, but that an African-American won for Best Adapted Screenplay. This was (in all the years of the Academy) the first time that black talent behind the scenes (writer, director, producer) was actually acknowledged. So: Kathryn Bigelow for Best Director for "The Hurt Locker" and Geoffrey Fletcher for Best Adapated Screenplay for "Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire". It's funny how the screenplay win was overlooked in the rush to judgement re: a woman winning Best Director.

This is also one of the real problems with show business: this oversimplification of the complexity of the whole picture. I remember talking to an African-American writer-director, who was expressing his frustration at the way that, as the actors have gained more clout in the industry (Denzel Washington, Halle Berry, Morgan Freeman, Forest Whitaker, Samuel L. Jackson) there hasn't been a concurrent commitment to black writing, directing and producing talent. Oprah Winfrey, for example, is one of the most powerful women in show business, as well as consistently the richest woman in show business. Yet she has rarely produced any project where she has sought black talent. Even on "Beloved", she wanted the imprimatur of white talent, so she hired Jonathan Demme to direct. Now, i think that, given the enormous complexities of the work, Demme did an honorable job, and "Beloved" is actually a credible film. But my point is: when Lee Daniels was trying to set up "Precious", he had no access to Oprah (or Tyler Perry). Only after the film was completed and was shown at Sundance, did Oprah and Tyler Perry step in to lend their names for support. Which (of course) was enormously important, and helped to raise the profile of the movie, but they could have been involved at an earlier stage and it would have made the production a lot easier.

But "Precious" is out and actually made money and a lot of people have seen it, and Mo'nique has won just about every award you could win, and Geoffrey Fletcher has won a few awards for his screenplay. The reason i'm so adamant about this nurturing of talent is that i've done that: when i've been on grant panels, when i was "support staff" (i.e., basically volunteering) at the IFP, when i was asked to consult for foundations, i've been very conscious of trying to find people of color, women, lesbian and gay talent. And the money in the nonprofit art scene gets smaller and smaller, and yet there are people who could help, yet they don't.

2010-03-01T23:54:00.000-08:00

The weather in Europe has taken a turn for the worst: there has been gale force winds and torrential rains in Portugal, Spain, and France; France has declared a national catastrophe. And now the cold is creeping into Germany (again) with the temperatures dipping close to freezing by the weekend. Plus freezing rain and light snow. The storms in western France is reported as responsible for over 50 deaths; people were caught by surprise when the storm hit in the middle of the night. Plus pictures from Frankfurt show how the winds have ripped through parts of that city, which is why the airports were closed for a while. Oh, well...

BBC News just ran a little interview with Tomm Moore, the director of the animated feature "The Secret of Kells" which was a surprise nominee for Best Animated Film. There were clips, and it certainly looks good.

Eugene Hernandez sent a ballot about the Independent Spirit Awards and the Acadeny Awards: those of us who are listed on the critics page of IndieWire are invited to give our opinions on the awards, i.e., who we think will win, and who we think should win. The New York Times started to do that a few years ago. (Is it true that the New York Times film critics are still not allowed to participate in the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics? How is that possible, when Andre Sennwald and Bosley Crowther were stalwarts of the New York Film Critics Circle for decades, and Sennwald was one of the people who started the organization, and they were the primary New York Times film critics of the 1930s and 1940s?) I'd like to participate, but i feel as if i haven't seen enough. In categories like Costume or Set Design: i'm not sure i've seen anything that was nominated in some of those categories. And i don't (as a rule) see animated features. Not because of any antipathy, but because i never get invited to those screenings. I wind up seeing animated features on TV or when they're released on DVD.

Did i miss something or did A.O. Scott, Manohla Dargis and Stephen Holden already do their Academy Award round-up? Though i think it's amusing (i always think it's amusing), the Academy Awards really have nothing to do with me, and i don't really pay attention. In the past few years, Larry and i got out of the habit of watching the telecast. It's usually tedious, and so much of the telecast is inane, and we preferred watching "The L Word" (which was usually on opposite). We were a niche market (and proud of it). The Independent Spirit Awards started to get bogus as well; i liked it when it was just people gathered in a tent on the Santa Monica beach, getting drunk and saying outrageous things. But as "independent" films and Hollywood films really overlap now, some of the irreverence has seeped out of the Spirit Awards.

But i won't know, because they've moved the awards to Friday night (rather than Saturday afternoon) and so it seems as if Film Independent is trying to go for a more formal atmosphere, but i won't be able to see it. Not in Berlin, anyway.

I got a series of e.mail notifications from the IFP: there's a new website, logging in is different (new passwords, etc.) and everyone has a new membership number. But no one answers the question: what is happening at the IFP? Michelle Byrd is supposed to have left as Executive Director, but has that post been filled, or are they still involved in the search process? Certainly, the members have not been given any indication.

The BBC business news reports that Australia is now the fastest growing economy in the Asian market. Well, that's good news, and i hope that people i know in Australia are able to take advantage of the current boom.

The Euro continues to stall as the US economy shows signs of recovery.

2010-03-01T06:17:00.000-08:00

Watching the footage of the aftermath of the earthquake in Chile has been wrenching: it's really like something out of a dystopian science fiction movie. When the earthquake hit in Haiti, the footage was mostly of the devastation, and also of the rescue efforts. CNN, in particular, covered the disaster in terms of rescue and recovery. But in Chile, the devastation is severe (though, so far, the death count is not nearly as overwhelming as in Haiti), but the desperation, the fear and the anger seem to be primary.

It's very frightening.

However, for entertainment, i did watch the closing ceremonies from the Winter Olympics. Two immediate thoughts: it certainly seemed endless; is everybody Canadian? Even Neil Young showed up. One of the only ones missing from the lineup seemed to be Joni Mitchell. Another Canadian missing was Christopher Plummer (after all, they did have Michael J. Fox, Catherine O'Hara and William Shatner). Have to admit: the final hockey match between the US and Canada was a nailbiter. And the Olympics provided hours of entertainment, and, yes, this year, even curling seemed to be exciting. And you had to admire the Norwegians for wearing those pants! Even the New York Times made a note of those diamond-patterned red pants.

Also on the news was the flooding that has taken place in parts of Europe, specifically Spain and Portugal. That, plus the instability of the economic situation (Greece being a country under financial duress right now) are not exactly signs of the robust outlook which many predicted for Europe just before the Christmas holidays. The news footage of Lisbon under water, with so many houses flooded, was very sad.

The weather is expected to be grey and wet for the next few days... but at least, it's not expected to be freezing! That's such a relief.

2010-02-28T08:06:00.000-08:00

Rain expected for the next two days in Berlin, but not the bitter cold. Today, it rained in the morning, was sunny for most of the afternoon, and now it's back to grey for the evening, with possibilities for showers.

Went to the exercise room today, the first time in about a month; sloth overtook me, because of the hideous weather. Trying to get back to some balance; Berlin really knocked the wind out of me.

The question is: why? And the answer is: i've never been alone so much in my life. I didn't even come out of the womb by myself! During my junior high years, i did go through the usual existential crisis, and i felt totally alienated. But who am i kidding? I've never been alone. Lonely, at times, but never alone.

And now i am alone. And i've never been away from New York City for more than three months at a stretch. All that adds up to the fact that i was particularly vulnerable in the past few weeks. I might have been able to handle the horrorshow of the Berlinale, if i didn't feel exposed. But it was just one more pileup of the hideousness i've experienced in this city.

Yet on Friday, i decided to actually walk around the neighborhood where i'm staying. I've walked in the direction of the Freie Universitat, and i've even found shortcuts. But i never just walked around to see what's here. It's still not that much, but it's a little more than i thought.

But (as mentioned previously) i always fixate on the negative. Once, when i was applying for a grant, i needed four recommendations. So i sent a little note to 30 people, asking them if they'd write me a reference. And only one person said no. But 29 people said yes. But it didn't matter: that one person was the one that got to me.

It's always like that.

One thing is that i've been going to see a lot of movies. Ok, i missed my chance at the Berlinale (by the first weekend, there were so many complaints that the old policy, where badgeholders were let in to the official press screenings if there was enough space, and there usually was because those screenings were at the Palast, which is huge, was reinstated, but i'd been avoiding the whole mess), but i've been seeing a lot of movies. "It's Complicated". "Invictus". "Up In the Air". A lot of these movies, i wouldn't have seen because when i'm home, i only go to the press screenings i'm invited to, which tend to be foreign and independent films and documentaries. I mean: i even saw "Avatar" in 3D! Now i can't wait to see "Alice in Wonderland" in 3D.

2010-02-24T14:16:00.000-08:00

The Berlinale came and went; i mostly avoided the event, but i got enough out of it to make it worthwhile. Not in terms of movies (i didn't actually see that many) but simply in terms of running into friends, etc.

The effect was to make Berlin seem like an inhabitable city, rather than an impregnable fortress. Also: it was nice to encounter sanity.

One of the highlights of the festival turned out to be the screenings of three films from the 1930s by Yasujiro Shimazu, a contemporary of Ozu and Naruse at Shochiku. As a director, Shimazu is rather more relaxed than either Ozu or Naruse, though the territory of the shomin-geki is the same. I was able to see two of the three films, "The Trio's Engagements" and "The Lights of Asakusa", both from 1937. "The Trio's Engagements" was really charming, a comedy about three young men who get jobs in a store that sells fabric (mostly rayon, and one of their tasks is to convince the customers that rayon is just as good as silk). "The Lights of Asakusa" was fascinating because it involved the interactions among a theatrical troupe. But if, in the 1920s and 1930s, "orientalism" was a rage amongst the cosmopolitan set in London and New York City, so "The Lights of Asakusa" shows the reverse: what might be called "occidentalism" among the Japanese, as the troupe is an operetta troupe, performing Western style musical theater.

Anyway, seeing more films. I'm anxious to see the new Tim Burton "Alice in Wonderland", not necessarily because i'm the biggest Tim Burton fan (he lost me a while ago, around the time of "Planet of the Apes", though i must admit to liking his adaptation of "Sweeney Todd"), but because i can't wait to see another movie in 3D!

Michael O'Sullivan has been having fun with his blog, talking about movies from the 1950s. I think it's now possible to have fun....

Of course, more cooperation from the weather would help: today, woke up to find that it was snowing again! And this, after four days of weather that was clear and partly sunny and abiove freezing! But it's supposed to get back to inching towards 10 degrees Celsius, so finally, it seems as if not just morning but spring has broken.

2010-02-15T13:31:00.001-08:00

Michael O'Sullivan's comments on Valentine's Day movies (some of his choices include "Breakfast at Tiffany's", "An Affair to Remember" and "Love Is a Many Splendored Thing", "The Proposal"; found at http://www.osullivan60.blogspot.com/) reminded me that the only time i was ever in Berlin, it was for the Berlin Film Festival, i was with Larry, and on Valentine's Day, we went to the press screening of "Shakespeare in Love" (which we had not seen in New York City) and it was a good movie for that particular day.

But i also remember that i never wanted to ever return to Berlin. The reason: one afternoon, we were at an Ubahn station, Larry was walking behind me (he's always slow and walking behind and i get impatient and race on ahead) and as i got to the top of the stairs, a group of about five boys (all with buzzcuts) raced in my direction and tried to knock me down the stairs. Larry actually ran up to catch me, but the boys had already run out of the station. This was a period when the news reports talked of a rise in anti-immigrant sentiment in Berlin, and increases in racially-motivated violence. And i experienced it.

And i NEVER wanted to return to Berlin, EVER. And now i'm here, because of a fellowship, which sounded good on paper, but you would think that a city which had a reputation which was (shall we say) not the best in terms of its sensitivity to "otherness" would make an effort to try to be polite to people. But not in Berlin.

There are pockets. That's why Claudia, Brian and i like Potsdamer Platz: not because it's such an architectural marvel (it's pretty hideous, and it's badly designed to boot, with these horrid metal plates stuck in the sidewalk areas, which, in the freezing weather, become lethal), but because it's a tourist trap area where people try to understand you if you don't speak German, and don't get all snotty on you. And it's the place where American and British movies are shown in the "o.v." (original version) with no subtitles. And the Kino Arsenal shows great classic movies.

I think my hatred of the Berlinale stems from the fact that i've had a horrible experience of being stuck in Berlin, and i was looking forward to the festival for some relief. I thought i'd see a few movies, run into friends, have a nice time.

Intead: my accreditation was messed up, there's this absolutely asinine system (oh, you can get tickets for the next day if you come at 8 in the morning... 8? it takes me almost an hour to get there, so if i take a shower, etc. i have to wake up every day at 6 to get tickets for the next day? what kind of stupidity is this?), and the people i encountered on the first day were hideously rude and snotty and snippy to me, no one more so than Frauke Greiner. Who did NOT apologize for her mistake but told me, oh, but i do not know you, and you are a nobody! Who the hell is she to tell me i'm a nobody?

I'm a nobody? She's the biggest pinchfaced loser i've ever met. And Reid Rosefelt told me she was nice (because she used to work for him). Well, that was back in the day (and we were all younger then) and sorry to report, she's become a horror.

But because i don't have many friends in Berlin, i did make the effort to go to the panel discussion on curating that Marc Siegel was on... also Stuart Comer (who had given a lecture on William E. Jones's work on Friday; he works at the Tate Modern, but he sounds American to me) and Henriette Huldisch (evidently some sort of assistant to Chrissy Isles at the Whitney, but Chrissy Isles is British, so i guess it's a fair exchange) and Heinz Emigholz. Stefanie Schulte Strathaus was the moderator, and it was enjoyable. But i went because of Marc, but then James Benning told me he was doing something at 5:30... so i went and asked if there were tickets, but i was told it was all sold out, yada yada yada. So, sorry, i just walked out and went home.

I'm probably going to see nothing, because i refuse to be part of the herd and do as i am told. That's not to why i came to Berlin: to be a sheep being led to the slaughter. (And yes, i mean that metaphor in the most literal and unpleasant way possible.)

These people are ridiculous: what if they really had to deal with Jack Smith? Or Harry Smith for that matter?

I never thought i'd be as crazy as Jack Smith, but Berlin has driven me to it!

2010-02-15T09:10:00.000-08:00

Enough about the stupid Berlinale!

The Winter Olympics are happening in Vancouver. Weather problems: Vancouver must be one of the few places where it's too warm! And no snow. I wish that Vancouver could export some of the massive winter weather from other parts of the world (like Berlin! or even New York City!). But i've been watching the Olympics on EuroSport, and even though the commentary is in German, i know enough to figure out what's happening.

But as each year goes by, the sadness i feel about the Olympics grows. Because there were three people that i would always watch/talk about the Olympics with: my father, Kenny, and Pauline. In fact with Pauline, once she had retired, there were times when we'd call each other while we were watching the Olympics, and then we'd chat and kibbitz and comment. Those were fun afternoons.

Now all three of them are dead, and i miss them. And i miss talking about the Olympics with them.

2010-02-15T02:41:00.000-08:00

Well, it's day five of the Berlinale, and i have been true to my word: haven't bothered to see a damned thing!

This must be the worst festival experience i've had in some 40 years of attending film festivals.

So much for that, since it's ridiculous. Not one single person on the damned staff has the courtesy to try to be civil. I don't understand why the bear is the symbol of this festival: it should be pigs.

However, i shall try to make it to the panel discussion with Marc Siegel, and if i can't get into that, that's it.

Never again.

Anyway, the installations at the DAADGalerie and Galerie Barbara Weiss proved to be a good contrast, because Phil Collins's pieces were... problematic, shall we say, but Heike Baranowsky's installations worked quite well.

Just a quick note: Phil Collins created pieces which were essentially narrative pieces. Just projecting one of the pieces ("soy mi madre") on a wall does not an installation make. In fact, it detracted from whatever qualities the piece might have had as a dramatic work. But Heike Baranowsky's pieces (the three-projected images of rather barren landscapes; the two monitor piece of mother and baby and fishtank, with the images in black-and-white with the only "color" being the orange goldfishes in the tanks) worked quite nicely as installations, because there was never the sense of narrative continuity which compelled a different attention span.

I'll have to think more about this, since it was also an issue with the installations at the Akademie der Kunste. (James Benning's installation, like Heike Baranowsky's pair, was successful, and for the same reason.)

One thing: i did find those galleries, so now i'm feeling a little more confident that i can find some of these places.

But the Berlinale: may it be plagued by locusts in its 60 years.

2010-02-12T07:55:00.000-08:00

Day two of the Berlin Film Festival (Berlinale) proper, and it hasn't gotten better. In fact, it's gone from bad to worse. To begin with: today, there was supposed to be an opening (starting at 15 hr, or 3 PM) of "Cinema City", three installations by artists from India. But when i got there, nothing; instead, the lobby of the Kino Arsenal seemed to become a lounge for film industry people, more specifically, buyers.

I waited around, and i was supposed to meet people from the Center, but... no one showed up (and i waited for 40 minutes) so i left. However, i did run into Stephen Kent Jusick, who has been running MIX for the last few years. Turns out my horror story about the Berlin Film Festival is not unusual: he also had a horrible run-in, and he just got here!

I'm so relieved! Berlin IS a horrible city! The Berlin Film Festival IS a horror story! It's not just me!

Stephen and Matthew Fox (from London) were telling me that their "film festival" badges get them into... nothing. You have to get tickets, no matter what. And most of the tickets at their official "home" are available a day in advance, and are mostly gone.

So what's the use?

However, i did go to the Akademie der Kunste on Wednesday night, to see the opening of the exhibition "Traces the Sand Left In the Machine", a series of installations by: Christian Giroux an d Daniel Young ("50 Light Fixtures From Home Depot"), Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarate ("Assemblages"), Brigitte Kuster ("Entkolonisierung"), Joao Maria Gusmao and Pedro Paiva ("Tarciso (seeries of 3)/Atom") and James Benning ("Tulare Road"). Oddly enough, Robert Koehler just wrote about this show (he's here in Berlin for the festival) on Doug Cummings' film journey blogsite.

Yesterday, i tried to get to the Hamburger Bahnhof for the opening of the Heinz Emigholz exhibit, but, as usual, i got the directions from Googlemaps, but once i got off the Ubahn, i went in the wrong direction; when i retraced my steps... it was so cold and it was snowing, and i decided to just get back on the Ubahn and go back home.

But tonight, it's the DAAD Galerie and Galerie Barbara Weiss, and if i miss those, i'm really in bad shape, because (according to the maps) they're about two blocks away from the Veneklasen Werner Gallery, and i know how to get there!

2010-02-07T16:32:00.000-08:00

Donald Richie once told me that i would always look for the one bad comment; a hundred people can like something i've done, but if one person doesn't, i'll take that comment to heart. And it's stopped me many times over.

Berlin is like that one bad comment: i'm finding it difficult to concentrate in this city, because it's just so incredibly hostile. I'm not even talking about nice people, i'm just talking about common courtesy, which seems to be an unknown quantity in this city. And for the last few weeks, i've made half-hearted attempts to write, but i keep getting stumped.

Today, i did something that i used to do to prime myself: i started listening to music. A lot of pop music, mostly found on YouTube. I'm using the songs to prime my memory, to evoke those times and places and people that i want to remember.

The Berlinale (Berlin Film Festival) starts this week, i was looking forward to it, but i got the program, and it's disheartening, there's just so much, and the ticketing situation (even for press) is complicated, and i looked at the accreditation notification, i did NOT get the letter which was supposed to have been sent, and i was NOT registered as "press" but as "university". What kind of crap is this?

So already the Berlin Film Festival is on my shit list. As is everything else in this damned city.

And no, i do NOT want to go to gallery openings, because you can't find the damn places. The Veneklasen Werner Gallery is on Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse. But there IS no "Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse" on any map: it turns out that Kochstrasse, which IS on the map, turns into "Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse" for about three blocks. And this happened only about a year ago, and so things like Google Maps haven't accounted for the change. And how are we supposed to know this? I guess you're not.

However, once you get out from the Ubahn station at Kochstrasse, you walk to find that there is Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse. So that was easy. But trying to find Dam-Stuhltrager... forget it. And that's the way i feel about most of the Berlin galleries. Whatever street the gallery claims to be on was not easy to find. And it's sub-freezing weather, so i'm not trudging around, trying to navigate on the ice, trying to find streets that may or may not exist.

Obviously, Berlin is for younger people, but for someone who is (now) in his mid-50s and has already experienced an "art scene" of long standing (NYC from the late 1950s on)... it does have similarities to the art scene of the East Village in the 1970s, the subject of those documentaries at last year's Tribeca Film Festival, such as "Blank City" and "Burning Down the House". It's the art of reduced expectations, an exhausted art of a stultified city.

Anyway, speaking of the Veneklasen Werner Gallery, i did go to William E. Jones's opening (that was on January 15th) and it was a very handsomely mounted show, continuing his interest in archival material. In the booklet that was available at the gallery, Bill quotes from a manifesto by Isidore Isou in which Isou calls on film to become referential to the already rich history of the artform (and this was in 1951). It's a manifesto similar to Walter Benjamin's assertion that quotation was a necessary option. Appropriation becomes the logical outcome.

Of course, this strategy has been one of the hallmarks of postmodern aesthetics since the 1970s, and i should know; i remember that Anthony McCall and i had a lot of exchanges about using "old" material as a critical rebuke to modernist theories of artistic "evolution".

Everything old is new again. But in Berlin, everything old is old.

2010-02-03T04:06:00.000-08:00

So much has happened in the last few days (film-wise, anyway): the Sundance Film Festival gave out its awards, so did the Slamdance Film Festival; Kathryn Bigelow won the DGA Award as Best Director for "The Hurt Locker"; the Academy Award nominations were announced.

The producer David Brown died. My one real encounter with David Brown was at a panel that the late Steve Harvey organized at The Museum of Modern Art. The panel consisted of four very prominent producers (or producer-directors, as the case may be). I remember one was Tony Bill, another was Alan J. Pakula, another was David Brown... there was a fourth, and i am trying to remember who the fourth Hollywood biggie was. It was some guy noted, not just for being a tough operator, but also for being kind of a sleazeball. Was it Robert Evans? Was it Jon Peters? But there's a story to this.

Anyway, Tony Bill showed up with a small entourage, which actually consisted of his producing partners (one of whom was Julia - i'm having another senior moment, can't remember her last name offhand, but she's the one who wrote "You'll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again"); Alan Pakula was with his wife Hannah, who was very elegant. I remember that Helen Gurley Brown showed up, and she had small bandages on her face. There was a reception (was it before or after the panel, i can't remember) and someone actually asked her if she'd had an accident, and she was very forthright (and funny) and said, no, dear, i've just had a facelift, but i'm not ashamed of that fact, and i wanted to be here to support my wonderful husband! But there were several memorable moments during that panel.

But one thing i remember: at the reception, Steve Soba and i were assigned to take care of one of the girlfriends of Mr. Hollywood Sleazebag. He'd invited both of his girlfriends, but then he wanted to make sure that their paths didn't cross. So we had to take them in from different entrances, make sure that they were in different parts of the room, etc. Steve and i had to make sure that they were kept separate. Somehow, i was reminded of Fanny Brice in "The Great Ziegfeld"; for the audition, she starts singing "My Man" and she's dressed in a very elegant gown and then Ziegfeld (William Powell) rushes up and starts ripping the gown and says, No, no, no, i want her to be an urchin! And Fanny Brice sniffs, "For Ziegfeld, i gotta be an urchin; even in burlesque i was middle-class!" Here we were, working at The Museum of Modern Art's Department of Film, but for Mr. Hollywood Sleazebag, we had to be pimps.

Ah, movies: that's why i love 'em!

2010-02-02T02:38:00.000-08:00

Being sick when you're alone in a foreign city is not exactly an experience that i was desperate to have, but it happened. I had the worst cold ever (perhaps an exaggeration, but not by much) and it's been here for two weeks, and i've had it in Berlin, which is undergoing the global freeze that's happening everywhere (snow in southeastern US, freezing weather in India, etc.) but the freeze in Berlin is a little more than a sane person can take.

I finally started to go out this past weekend. Finally got to see Serge Bromberg's documentary on Henri-Georges Clouzot's unfinished "L'Enfer"; a fascinating document. The documentary is sometimes problematic (what's with the "enacted" scenes from the script?) but the footage that Clouzot shot retains an obsessive fascination. And yes, Romy Schneider was a movie star, and she gives the movie a charge that hasn't dated.

Also went to see "Sherlock Holmes". Guy Ritchie is far from my favorite director, but his riff on the Sherlock Holmes mythology had its charms. But it was a confounding movie in many ways. The sets: were they some elaborate constructions, or were they the most extensive use of CGI pictorialism yet devised? The pacing was breathless, but then, when the movie needed to take the time for a little exposition, the pacing went slack and the movie turned inert. But Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law play together with conspiratorial glee, and Rachel McAdams and Kelly Reilly are delightful as the women in their lives. (Kelly Reilly is one of those actresses, once she appeared, it kept nagging at me, i've seen her before, but where? I had to go to IMDB and look it up, and realize she was the showgirl in "Mrs. Henderson Presents" and Caroline Bingley in the recent "Pride and Prejudice", etc. Now that i've put a name to the face, i shall have to remember. And i do hope that, since it's obvious that "Sherlock Holmes" is headed towards franchise status, the women are retained, Rachel McAdams and Kelly Reilly really did add to the charm of the film.)

Yesterday, watched Deborah Warner's production of Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas" on the Arte Channel. I can see why it was a "controversial" production, and the TV production actually had some very damaging aspects: the close-ups on the singers were really unflattering (when people sing, especially when they're belting out a complicated aria, the facial contortions can get extreme: we didn't need to have that shoved right at us), what was with Fiona Shaw in that prologue, and there was a creepy aspect to the chorus of children. But, for all that, i was glad it was in English; it was a relief not to have to watch BBC News and CNN and (yes) MTV to hear something i could understand with no sweat.

Since i've been sitting in the little apartment here at the IBZ with my stuffy/drippy nose, a lot has happened. Sundance and Slamdance came and went, and i read reports online about those festivals. Jean Simmons died, a great loss to many of us who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, when she was one of the great stars (though, after her brilliant start in such movies as "Great Expectations" and "Hamlet", she never quite got roles commensurate with her talent). James Mitchell died, immortal as Cyd Charisse's ballet choreographer-boyfriend in "The Band Wagon" (who was able to work continually on soap operas, including his memorable work on "One Life to Live"; that's what some people don't understand, the demise of soap operas really will affect so many aspects of show business, because soap operas were a place where many performers and technicians were able to continue to work and make a living). J. D. Salinger died, bringing with it a lot of talk about art and fame, about retreating from public life, and speculation about the fate of "Catcher in the Rye", which Salinger refused to allow to be adapted in his lifetime. But his lifetime is over.

On the Internet Movie Database, there was sad news: two of the regulars posters on the Classic Film Board died last week. Brought to mind the fact that in recent years, there have developed these virtual communities, where people from all over have been able to join together over a common obsession ("classic films" in this case). We "network" in new ways, on these message boards, on Facebook, on Twitter... but what does that mean for old-fashioned face-to-face interaction? Two weeks ago, i had a fright: someone i care about was no longer on Facebook. So i sent him an e.mail; turns out he decided to delete his account, because he was getting tired of the virtual narcissism, and the lack of actual human interaction. I was glad; he's someone who was very ill in the last few years, and i was afraid he'd taken a turn for the worse.

But for me, Facebook is a recreation of my life, of the various people (starting from high school) who were important in my life, but are no longer nearby. So many of us have moved, gone on to other things, but those old friendships meant something, and this way, there's still a connection. I'm no longer in New York City's Soho (where i lived for over 25 years); not many people i know still live there, either. But we're still "in touch", even if only on a virtual level. And that's especially important when you're in a foreign city, and, boy, Berlin is as foreign as i hope to ever get!

2010-01-24T15:46:00.000-08:00

The last few days have been a blur: i've had a cold and it's just wrecked me. I've slept through most of the weekend, and haven't really had the energy to do much. However, i should say that the weather here in Berlin has not exactly been conducive to going out. The cold is brutal: minus degrees celcius (-10, -14, -16) for days. Insane.

And then i get tired very easily, and have been taking naps.

But a few quick notes. Howard Dean was on BBC this morning, and what he said was (i think) exceptionally lucid and on-the-mark. The "lesson" of the Massachusetts special election is not that the country (per se) is swinging right: "right" and "left" are becoming increasingly meaningless in US political discourse. Instead, there is a demand for change. ANY change. There is a sense of betrayal: Obama has not brought about any significant change, and people are fed up with the constant equivocation. People want a clear health-care bill, they want a public option, they do NOT want a bill obviously designed to placate the special interests of insurance companies. But Obama keeps trying to "compromise": people don't want compromise, they want change.

The Screen Actors Guild Awards were last night; couldn't watch it from here in Berlin (not that i ever watch it; i don't watch award shows as a rule), but followed the results. Mo'nique seems unstoppable, as does Christoph Waltz. The surprise was Sandra Bullock's win for "The Blind Side". Was glad that "Glee" won the award for Best Ensemble Cast for a television comedy.

Watching the news (what else is there in English?); tried to watch the Paris Hilton show on MTV (that's how desperate i am for English-language programming), but enough was enough!

The death of Jean Simmons was very poignant: she was one of the big stars of the 1950s, yet she never quite fulfilled the promise of her early career, because she was rarely given the proper roels or the proper vehicles. But, still, she was one of the finest actresses of her generation, and she will be immortal because of such movies as "Great Expectations". "Hamlet", "Angel Face", "The Actress", "Guys and Dolls", "Elmer Gantry", "Spartacus". And she gave so many wonderful performances, in a wide variety of films, including "The Robe", "Desiree", "Home Before Dark", "Until They Sail", "The Big Country", "All the Way Home", "The Happy Ending".

But starting to fade. I hope i get over this cold fast!

2010-01-22T03:06:00.000-08:00

Agh! This cold is terrible. I am speaking both of the weather here in Berlin (-10 degrees C? and expected to reach -14 degrees C or -16 degrees C this weekend?) and of my health.

Yesterday woke up with my nose absolutely stuffed; you know how you're fighting off a cold (the little scratchiness in your throat?) and you don't want to admit it's coming on. And then it hits. So right now, i'm totally knocked out.

But i have been thinking about the experience of seeing "Avatar". Brian Singleton and i went to see it at the Cinestar IMAX Theater in Potsdamer Platz, so we could see it in 3D; we went on Sunday, and (of course) it was a sold-out house. From the start, there was a feeling of excitement; as soon as we got the 3D glasses, we were thrilled. Instead of those cardboard wraparounds that they used to give out at 3D screenings, we received those plastic-frame glasses (which fit rather comfortably over our regular glasses).

It was a spectacular experience, certainly the most sophisticated use of 3D i've ever seen. Does that change my views on what i saw in 2009? No. But it points to other aspects of performance and art: the need for spectacle, the desire for novelty, the appetite for grandeur and glamour. Having a good time at "Avatar" isn't that different from liking a Robert Wilson production.

Of course, the news is dominated by the problems in Haiti. At this time, the most reliable agencies in terms of the ability to mobilize and the ability to actually provide essential services seem to be the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders.

George Robinson just posted his review of Andre Techine's "The Girl on the Train"; in this case, George starts from an interview which he did with Techine, and i think George is able to say some very piercing comments about the film (which is one i admire a great deal). George's website: www.cine-journal.blogspot.com.

Joe Baltake has some funny comments on Meryl Streep; since Streep has tackled Anna Wintour ("The Devil Wears Prada") and Julia Child ("Julie & Julia"), isn't it about time Streep tackled Pauline Kael? Of course, when "Prime" came out, someone (was it Carrie Rickey? Was it Molly Haskell?) mentioned that the mimic-mad Streep seemed to have modelled the character of the mother-psychologist after Pauline Kael. But Joe also has a great post about Richard Quine, one of those underrated Hollywood directors from the 1950s. Joe's website: www.thepassionatemoviegoer.blogspot.com.

Question: do i try to go out this afternoon, even if only to the supermarket? Hmmm....

2010-01-13T10:42:00.000-08:00

Anger never gets anything accomplished. Unfortunately, some situations just get the better (or worse) of you. So it is with me and Berlin. I haven't been able to find anything here of real interest, and leaving all the people at home (family and friends) is not conducive to good feelings.

And trying to watch television, when the only English language channels are CNN and BBC, and what is carried is the news, makes it particularly depressing. Arte and Bloomberg alternate on the same channel, with Arte coming on at 2 o'clock in the afternoon; but that leaves the morning with Bloomberg, with all this financial news crap which is even more depressing. How can one sit and listen to the fatuities of someone who is now head of Bank of America, when his previous jobs included being head of Morgan Stanley and, before that, Lehman Brothers? Why is it that certain people can fail upwards? Isn't there a limit to incompetence?

It should be apparent: i have never been alone in my life. I started out as a twin, so even from birth, i was not alone. And i met Larry in my sophomore year (when i was 18) and we've been together since then. I always have a support system of people.

And i've never been away from home (that is: New York City) for more than three months tops. And to be in this strange city: i keep waiting to find the true center of the city, the place where there are all the art galleries and the interesting art people and the fascinating conversations. I guess what i'm waiting for is for Berlin to turn into the city of my youth.

Did i know New York City was wonderful when i was experiencing it? I think i did. Christine and Debby tell me that i always knew things to go to (walking up those stairs to get to the loft to hear Phil Glass's early concerts; going to all those different places for Charlotte Moorman's Annual Avant-Garde Festivals; seeing dances by Trisha Brown or Simone Forti at art galleries).

Obviously, Berlin isn't that, but i'm looking for some sense of camaraderie. I never realized it, but so many of those events we went to had small audiences. 50 to 100 people packed into a space to listen to Charlemagne Palestine: that's actually not a lot.

Yet it seemed enough for us. Of course, i was always skeptical, and so many of those people just seemed so fatuous, and i often couldn't resist the wisecrack.

But the isolation is killing. Actually Shigeko Kubota (years ago) warned me about it: when she had her DAAD grant, she felt like she was being punished, by being sent to Berlin. I know what she means.

2010-01-13T02:59:00.000-08:00

The death of Eric Rohmer brought poignant memories of just how thrilling his movies seemed the first time they played here: "My Night at Maud's" just seemed so radical, because it seemed conventional, but only seemed, the continual shifting of perspectives and the piercing conversations were crystalline and so fine-tuned. And how refreshing it seemed! To have a movie in which adults acted like adults, and talked like adults! And how intelligent and how witty were that talk.

In a way, Rohmer was very much like Ozu, in that he was a filmmaker who continually crafted his little bit of ivory until it was gleaming. I believe that Richard Corliss said, in his obit in Time Magazine, that Rohmer was not someone who made masterpieces. But that's assuming that masterpieces are huge, sprawling, overreaching works. But there is also the classical tradition, in which the goal is a perfection of form and content, in which whatever aims and themes of the work are prefectly achieved and expressed, in which everything coheres in absolute formal perfection. And in that case, there are several works of Rohmer's which qualify. Certainly, Rohmer was a master of his domain, and why shouldn't that be enough?

2010-01-13T00:05:00.001-08:00

January 12, 2010. The year we made contact: wasn't that the tagline for the movie "2010"? But in this case, contact has been the horrendous news of the earthquake in Haiti. Haiti has been a country of such contrasts, and now there has been this catastrophe. Watching the news now and feeling a sense of helplessness.

George Robinson has filed his reviews on this year's Jewish Film Festival, of which i went to some of the press screenings. His reviews can be found from links on his blog: http://www.cine-journal.blogspot.com/ though the reviews can be found directly at Jewish Week.

Joe Baltake takes on some more "lost" films: the pair of films made from Peter Schaffer's pair of one-act plays, "The Public Eye/The Private Ear", which became two feature films, "The Private Ear" becoming Brian Hutton's "The Pad, and How To Use It" (one of the few films to star that redoubtable actor Brian Bedford, along with James Farentino and Julie Sommars) and "The Public Eye" becoming the Carol Reed film (retitled "Follow Me" in Great Britain) starring Mia Farrow and Topol. And he also writes about John Frankenheimer's adaptation of Bernard Malamud's "The Fixer", a prestige number with a high-profile cast including Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde, Georgia Brown, Elizabeth Hartman, and Hugh Griffith. That movie really is among the missing: it hasn't surfaced in decades (as far as i know). But Joe Baltake always finds the time to talk about these lost treasures (or not-so-treasures, as the case may be): http://www.thepassionatemoviegoer.blogspot.com/.

The talk in the art world right now (and the talk has become the shout) is the appointment of Jeffrey Deitch to the position of Director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. There's a lot of debate about the incursion of "commerce" into the sacrosant environs of the musem world. Oh, please! But this seems to have destabilized the class structure of the art world, and it will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

And i'm interested in how this plays out. Or how anything plays out.

2010-01-12T15:30:00.000-08:00

It's now January 11; have been back in Berlin since Dec. 30, and enough already! Feel like it's time to go home. The weather here is dreadul, but i understand that it is dreadful everywhere else. But what really gets me is the isolation: i don't really know anyone here in Berlin, and i feel trapped.

Anyway, some notes. My friend Michael O'Sullivan has started a blog (http://www.osullivan60.blogspot.com/) which is quite charming and witty, rather like Mike himself. And another new blog is from Arthur S. in India (http://www.thispigsalley.blogspot.com/) which offers some of the best film writing around: his close reading of Leo McCarey's "Good Sam" is exceptional.

Of course, Kevin Lee has been a real pioneer in terms of internet film criticism. His writing is simply and utterly amazing, as he parses films, and then adds all sorts of other information, such as samples of reviews, stills and film clips. Kevin is so singular: if i were younger, i hope that i would be as inventive and resourceful as Kevin.

So those are three people who have helped me maintain some sort of sanity here. The temperature has been -2 degrees C, -3 degrees C. Well, why don't they just say, hell froze over, and it's Berlin!

2010-01-03T05:54:00.000-08:00

New Year's Eve in Berlin proved to be quite an experience. Of course, it had snowed during the day, and that meant the third day of snow in a row. But the experience was the fireworks. During the afternoon, little smatterings of explosions could be heard, but by five in the afternoon, the explosions became more regular. You could hear them; when i walked to the supermarket, i could see the remnants (red marks in the snow). By the time night set in, the sky would suddenly flare up as more fireworks were set off. But that was always at a bit of a distance.

However, by 10:30 at night, the kids in the neighborhood were gathered in the street below, just outside my window, and they started setting off fireworks: sky rockets and pinwheels and all manner of firecrackers. And so, from my window, i could see fireworks blazing for the New Year. That continued well past midnight: they finally stopped around 1:30 AM. So there was about three hours of fireworks right outside my window.

So that was my New Year's Eve here in Berlin.

Today, i was reading Scott Macauley's thoughts on the Filmmaker Magazine e.mail. It concerned the Best of the Decade poll which Filmmaker ran amongst its editors and staff. The point was to come up with the best "independent" films of the decade. Macauley notes this because he was a little disturbed by the results. The top three films in the poll were: "Mulholland Drive", "There Will Be Blood" and "No Country For Old Men". Macauley notes that the decade was one which made it difficult to define "independent" film in the US, as mini-majors such as Miramax and Focus Features (which were often specialty divisions of larger corporations) were able to finance projects, but because these were not "studio" films proper, those productions would be considered independent.

I'll have to think about this, but in terms of how i viewed the decade: my priorities were with those cinemas which i had some sort of personal involvement, such as the American experimental cinema (Ken Jacobs, Ernie Gehr, Jonas Mekas, Pat O'Neill, Jennifer Todd Reeves, et al) or Asian cinema, particularly Chinese-language cinema. So that defined how i set up my Best of the Decade list for IndieWire. I also threw in two veterans of the Nouvelle Vague, which had been the defining cinema of my youth. But if i had decided to expand, i probably would have included "Mulholland Drive", because i did love that film when i saw it... for me, going to the "Mulholland Drive" screening was very poignant, because it happened after 9/11, but it also happened after the death of Pauline Kael. Pauline had been such a supporter of David Lynch, and watching "Mulholland Drive", i keep thinking how much she might have enjoyed the movie.

There are so many people that i miss, but Berlin is an alienating experience so far. I haven't yet been able to find a support system that really allows me to feel free. I've never been a person who was a social butterfly: i'm the type of person with a few friends, and that's it. Claudia had been one of the friends that i made, but she's now back in the US, having finished her initial foray at the International Research Center. So i wonder what's next. Whatever it is, i hope that Berlin doesn't turn out to be an isolation ward....

2010-01-02T11:55:00.000-08:00

Well, here i am, back in Berlin. Made the trip to New York City and made the trip back. Have to say that the holidays went far too swiftly, it seemed as if i barely had time to see people when i had to leave.

I left Berlin on Friday, Dec. 18, 2009; boy, was i glad i did! Because the next day, the US was hit with a massive snowstorm; in Brooklyn, there was over a foot of snow! This caused enormous delays and cancellations for the flights over that weekend. Claudia, who was travelling from Berlin to her home in Connecticut, was on the Delta nonstop from Berlin to JFK on Sunday: her plane wound up being diverted, and what should have been an eight hour flight wound up... well, the plane was diverted because it couldn't land at JFK, then Claudia had to wait in Minneapolis(which is where the flight landed) to get a flight that would get her into the New York metropolitan area. All together, she wound up travelling for three days! But she's finally home.

Though it snowed that first weekend, making me virtually homebound, by Monday, the snow had abated and things were running smoothly. And i went to the Walter Reade Theater for press screenings for the Jewish Film Festival: "Leap of Faith", a documentary about adults who decide to convert to Judaism, and "Mary and Max", an animated feature from Australia. I bring this up, because Australia seems to have a thriving animation community. At the last New Directors/New Films series, there was $9.99, another animated feature. This raises the question: what is appropriate subject matter for animation? "Leap of Faith" was intriguing, because it showed a number of people, from very different walks of life, who made the decision to convert to Judaism. Raised all sorts of questions about what is faith?

Then the next day, went to Film Forum to catch the screening olf the South Korean documentary "Old Partner". It's "the clean old peasant" again! In many ways, "Old Partner" reminded me of Rouquier's "Farrebique", in that it seemed to be about people living in a pre-technological state, away from most of what we consider modern conveniences.

During that week, there was much discussion of the year in film: people were coming out with the various Top Ten lists. I participated in the IndieWire and the Village Voice/L.A. Weekly polls. I must admit that there is a dsicrepancy: the lists are not the same. Turned out that there were several films which got released after the deadlines, or it turned out that a film which i saw in another context in 2008 finally got some sort of theatrical run in 2009.

But that's for another time. And i do want to think about the films of the decade.

2009-12-15T05:07:00.001-08:00

Even though i'm in Berlin, the end-of-the-year film critics awards and polls have proven to be endlessly entertaining. Right off the bat, i have to make a point: i don't believe in consensus as a critical value. That is just... wrong! A critical perspective should be one where one's own aesthetic values are allowed to determine one's judgements. It used to be called "taste".

The reason i participate in these polls (i am included in the Village Voice/LA Weekly poll, and the IndieWire poll) is that i feel that my perspective (which is one which focuses on "alternative" film) should be represented, and i take a stand to include those films, either international or national, which find limited release because they're independent/experimental/whatever. I do not care if everyone else is flipping over James Cameron's "Avatar"; that's not my concern (and i'm not invited to be part of that juggernaut anyway). If there are people with similar interests in the "margins" as opposed to simply the commercial mainstream, fine. (James Quandt and J. Hoberman are two who usually find some overlap with my choices.) But i'm not here to provide another vote in a generalized consensus; quite the opposite.

And this brings me to the question: why has the poll taken on such significance? What happened to the individual critical voice?

2009-12-02T06:21:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2009; Berlin remains a very grey city. But on Monday, i did get my Village Voice/LA Weekly ballot handed in, and i realized that it was quite a good year, especially for women directors. Not that every film made by a woman that was released in 2009 was some sort of masterpiece, but the fact that there were so many was impressive. Just off the top of my head: Agnes Varda's "Les Plages d'Agnes", Lone Scherfig's "An Education", Jane Campion's "Bright Star", Claire Denis's "35 Shots of Rum", So Yung Kim's "Treeless Mountain", Doris Dorrie's "Cherry Blossoms", Kathyrn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker", Lucrecia Martel's "The Headless Woman", Naoko Ogigami's "Megane", Ursula Meier's "Home", Rebecca Miller's "The Private Life of Pippa Lee", Katherine Dieckmann's "Motherhood", Mira Nair's "Amelia", Monika Treut's "Ghosted", Nancy Meyer's "It's Complicated" and Marie-Helen Cousineau & Madeline Piujuq Ivalu's "Before Tomorrow." Plus Anthology Film Archives had the programs of films by Erika Beckmann, Su Friedrich, Abigail Child and Peggy Awesh, as well as the retrospective of Ulrike Ottinger. I'm impressed, but i guess nobody else is.

2009-11-16T05:48:00.000-08:00

It's now Monday, the 16th of November here in Berlin.

The whole experience of being in Berlin has been a curiously alienating one, because here i really do feel cut off from familiar surroundings. London, Paris, Tokyo: none of those cities ever felt as strange as Berlin.

Last week was the big "Fall of the Wall" celebration: 20 years since the Berlin Wall fell, and celebrations to... what? Celebrate the fall of Communism? Is the Fall of the Wall supposed to symbolize the triumph of Capitalism? it's a little schizophrenic.

But last Monday, there really was a big celebration which reached from Potsdamer Platz to the Brandenburg Gate. Claudia (another fellow here at the International Research Center) decided that we really wanted to see some of the festivities. So we trooped around in the rain, going from Potsdamer Platz to the Brandenburg Gate area (though it was impossible to get too near the Brandenburg Gate, there was a section already reserved for those people who had been able to get tickets, and then there were people who must have camped out for hours). We were able to see some of the festivities on the large-scale screens that were set up a few blocks from the Brandenburg Gate (we were about five blocks from the Gate).

There's been a lot happening, but right now i just want to focus on the issue of Performance as "commodity". How can performance be preserved?

Andre Lepecki from NYU's Performance Studies Dept. came to the Freie Universitat on Thursday, to deliver a lecture on the question of "the archive" and "the reconstruction" in terms of performance. I had fears that it would turn out to be an uncritical affirmation of "reconstruction" as a necessity in terms of Performance Art, but that wasn't the case. Lepecki brought some very smart and provocative examples, and really had a critical approach that was quite refreshing.

But in the past few weeks: in last week's NY Times Magazine, there was an article about the Merce Cunningham estate trying to wrestle with this problem of preserving the legacy of Cunningham's dances. And then this week, in the NY Times Arts & Leisure section, there was Claudia La Rocco's article about reconstructing Anna Halprin's work from 1967 (which will be at Dance Theater Workshop this week). And there's the review of Trisha Brown's residency at Dia:Beacon, where, since she does not have a proscenium to work with, Brown is reviving dances from the 1960s through the mid-1970s, dances which were meant to be done plein-air (as in the case of "Leaning Duets").

The question is why these "dances" are not seen in terms of the traditional method of traditional dance continuity, where a ballet such as "Swan Lake" is codified in terms of specific movements and then those movements are taught to the next generation. But with this "reconstruction" business, there is an attempt to revive, not the specifics of the dance, but the specifics of the experience.

And i don't know if that is possible.

One thing: i have been remiss about the Premio Dardos Award. Joe Baltake, who has the invaluable blog "The Passionate Moviegoer" (http://www.thepassionatemoviegoer.blogspot.com), just awarded me a Premio Dardos Award, which is supposed to highlight blogs which the writer finds particularly noteworthy. It's one of those things where you are given one of those awards, then you're supposed to select five more to award.

Well: Joe follows Dave Kehr and Carrie Rickey (as do i); i would also note that i follow Reid Rosefelt (http://www.speedcine.com/blog), George Robinson (http://www.cine-journal.blogspot.com), Michael Giltz (http://www.popsurfing.blogspot.com) and Ian Stott (http://www.theonelinereview.blogspot.com). But somehow i have to do this properly....

2009-10-30T18:17:00.001-07:00

It's been more than two weeks since i've landed in Berlin, and today was the first day in which i did not go to my office at the Center. Two weeks usually means that it's time to get some fresh supplies (such items as paper towels, toothpaste, etc.); i used up the little traveling tube of toothpaste, i used up the small traveling bars of soap, so i took the time to do the laundry (which takes two hours here; in Europe, the wash cycles and the drying cycles are done to conserve energy, so everything is longer because it's all stretched out), do some shopping, and then i headed to the Kino Arsenal to see the restored print of Jack Smith's "Normal Love".

I had been warned by a number of friends that the restoration was quite good, but somehow the experience of the movie was a little skewed. Flat. Now that i've seen it, i know what they mean. When Jack Smith showed "Normal Love" in the 1970s, he never simply ran the film. First of all, there was always an inexorably long wait. The audience would be sitting there as Jack fiddled around, looking through records, deciding what reels to show, etc. This process could take as much as three hours! Then, once the movie started, there would be interruptions: Jack would stop the projector, or he would change projectors, or he would take a scissor and decide to snip something out of the film while it was in the projector! Anything could happen....

Yet when the images did come on, they were frequently so mesmerically lush and strange that they approached the sublime.

And that was because of rather than in spite of the torpor and insanity that Jack submitted his audience to: it made the beautiful more piercing and emotional, because of the element of danger, of threat.

Now, that element has been removed, and what we're left with is a succession of lush and enriched and stunning color images. And the editing is astute, and there is the semblance of narrative.

All well and good, except that good isn't enough. In a way, it's a betrayal of Jack's aesthetic.

Well, exhaustion is setting in, so i'll have to see if i'm forgotten or remembered.

2009-10-22T03:00:00.000-07:00

Another day at the International Research Center, today there was a morning talk by Gay McAuley, a scholar who has written on Aboriginal traditions as well as other aspects of Australian performance culture. Provoked a lively discussion.

Quite interesting. Will be going tonight to the keynote address by Marvin Carlson for the conference "Politics of Space: Theatre and Topology". Will have to meet up with the other fellows; evidently it's rather far from the University, the Institute for Cultural Inquiry. One thing: Berlin (right now) is a mecca in terms of art funding. What that means in terms of art is anyone's guess.

2009-10-21T14:15:00.000-07:00

It took a week, but finally had the WiFi link installed in my place here in Berlin; for the most part, have been using the computer supplied by the International Research Center for my office. Well, finally feel human. Strange how things like that can really affect you: we've become so accustomed to our electronic universe!

But it's a busy week here, and with more to come.

In the New York Times, there was an article by Stephen Farber about the BAM series 1962; this prompted Joe Baltake to make a list of notable releases of 1962 in the US. There are so many vagaries: Antonioni's "L'Eclisse" came almost as soon as it was released in Europe, but "Il Grido" finally made it here after half a decade. And so on. To check out Joe's list, go to http://www.thepassionatemoviegoer.blogspot.com and see what else wound up in the US in 1962.

Anyway, that's it for now. Have to get ready for a busy day tomorrow at the International Research Center.

2009-10-16T03:37:00.000-07:00

It's now Friday, October 16, and i'm now in Berlin to start my ten-month residency as a Fellow at the International Research Center: "Interweaving Performance Cultures" of the Freie Universitat Berlin. It's already been rather hectic. And there's still more to do.

I've never been out of New York City for more than three months at a time. So this is really quite a change. I've also never really been on my own for an extended period of time. Never, in fact.

So in a way i'm at sea.

But first things first. I left as the New York Film Festival was ending. A very strange festival, this year. I think the selection committee was constrained by what was actually out there. Not much that was startling.

The opening night film was Alain Resnais's "Les Herbes Folles"; the film was quite polished and smooth. While watching it, i was lulled by the absolute command that Resnais has. And when i walked out of the movie, i felt slightly disoriented, but then i flashed onto the major disorientations i had coming out of "Hiroshima Mon Amour", "Last Year at Mariendbad", "Muriel", even "La Guerre est finie". Walking out of those movies for the first time, i didn't quite feel the same; it was like i had to look at the world with new eyes. "Les Herbes Folles" didn't have that same uncanny ability to totally redirect one's perceptions.

Still, it was a film of great charm and accomplishment. Though to like late Resnais (certainly since "Melo"), you've got to like Sabine Azema.

Didn't sleep much last night, and starting to fade. A few things to check out, and then i'll probably go back to the apartment where i'm staying and take a nap.

2009-10-11T11:56:00.000-07:00

In the Wall Street Journal of Thursday, October 8, 2009, there was an article by James M. Berquist on the relocated and redesigned Museum of Chinese in America (ex-Chinatown History Project, ex-Chinatown History Museum, ex-Museum of the Chinese in the Americas); the article was titled "From Chinatown to Everytown"; what was fascinating about the article was that the author tried to detail some of the subtleties of the Chinese-American experience that the museum now acknowledges. This dovetails with what my father was trying to do with the Ellis Island Project and with the early Chinatown History Museum. From the article: "From the early days in the gold fields of California, their circumstances created an unusually insular and defensive ethnic community. Chinese came as sojourners and were expected to return to their homeland. Those who stayed were denied citizenship under the naturalization laws of the time. Their presence raised the ire of white working-class elements, and the result was the first American law to specifically exclude a racial or ethnic group, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The act excluded working-class Chinese, while allowing merchants, teachers and tourists to enter." Well, the reason this statement is important is that "working-class Chinese" were excluded, but other Chinese had an easier time of it, with the ability to bring in their wives, etc. People who were "merchants, teachers and tourists", and that's where you find my great-grandparents.

So this whole "immigrant" story of working on the railroads, or working in laundries or restaurants: i have NO idea what the hell people are talking about, because that wasn't the experience of my family AT ALL! Not my father's family, and not even my mother's family. We weren't working class. I'm sorry. We never were.

When we were looking through the materials that my father had left for the Chinstown History Museum, there was a page from some sort of directory, which showed his grandfather (my gandmother's father) and his uncle (my grandmother's older brother). My great-grandfather had gone to the newly opened New York University, where he got what was the equivalent of an MBA; his son (my great-uncle Fong) had gone to Columbia University (which i hadn't known, but that was my alma mater also). My grandmother's younger brother, Duck, had gone to MIT. My great-aunt Ying had gone out to California, and she went to college out there (i think it was UCLA). My grandmother did not go to college: what happened was that there was the flu epidemic, and my grandmother had gotten sick, and they had to take her out of school, and she was sick for a while, and her parents made her stay home for about a year. (This was something that my grandmother and my father told me.) And her parents were very protective, because they were afraid that she was very sickly. (Of course, my grandmother wasn't just a hearty survivor, she outlived almost everybody, she was 90 when she died.)

But (and this was my father's point) even so, the family faced a great deal of prejudice. Neither of his uncles ever really could find a job: there's the famous story of Uncle Duckie (who graduated third in his class at MIT) being offered a job with the Ford motor company, but when he showed up, they realized that (gasp) he wasn't a white person (his name was "D.K. Tom"), and suddenly the job was filled. That always happened to him, until he wound up getting a job through his father, and worked for a liquor distribution company starting in the late 1930s. And Uncle Fong went to China, to become an executive in a bank in Shanghai.

In my father's account, he writes that his parents' marriage was more or less arranged. Which was true. My grandmother was already 23, and she'd already refused several people. But i had actually asked my grandmother why she decided to accept my grandfather, and she said, "Because he said he wanted to get out of Chinatown." Which he did: for the first ten years of their marriage, my grandfather tried several business ventures where they relocated. But there were many reversals, including several business deals where my grandfather was cheated by his partners (who were white) and they eventually had to come back to Chinatown, where they settled on the fifth floor of 65 Mott Street (with my grandmother's parents living on the second floor of that building). My grandmother had wanted, because she had been so sheltered, a chance to get out of the "unusually insular and defensive ethnic community" of Chinatown. And my grandfather tried to give it to her. But all sorts of circumstances brought them back to Chinatown.

But that decade accounts for the differences in the experiences of my father (who was born in the middle of all those various business ventures) and his younger brother (who was born just before the family finally settled in Chinatown for good).

And i'm reminded of all this, not just because of articles about the Museum of Chinese in America, but because of the death of my uncle, and seeing my cousins this week at the funeral service.

2009-10-07T18:39:00.000-07:00

It's been more than a month. A lot has happened. The New York Film Festival has been having its press screenings; the opening night was very different, in that there was no afterparty at Tavern on the Green. It's been hectic, and i've only been able to see about half the films.

Yesterday, i had to attend the funeral service for my uncle Edmund; he was my father's younger brother. Over the summer, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Perhaps it is strange to say, but the wake and the service and the dinner after were all incredibly... warm and familial. Growing up, my uncle and his family lived out on Long Island, and so it wasn't that easy to see them.

When we were growing up, we were surrounded by my mother's family, not just because she had such a large family (in all: there were 15 children), but because they lived near us.

Last week, the New York Times had an article about the Museum of the Chinese in the Americas, which has just opened in its new quarters on Lafayette Street. The article was about the Hom family, one of the families profiled in the museum. (Thomas Hom is our family dentist.) And that reminded me that my father had wanted to collect material on the Chin and Tom families (Tom was my grandmother's family) for the Chinatown History Museum (which evolved into the Museum of the Chinese in the Americas). My father and his friend Robert (whose nickname was Smokey) had volunteered to help collect data on New York City's Chinatown for the Ellis Island project. What my father wanted was to document that society of Chinatown in that period from the early 1930s to 1965, before the immigration laws changed and there began the flood of Chinese immigrants from other parts of China. Previously, the majority of the Chinese in the United States came from Canton. And the Cantonese in the various Chinatowns (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, New York City) lived in very restricted areas (when i was growing up, Chinatown proper consisted of about six blocks, centered on Mott Street from Canal Street to the Bowery, with Mulberry, Pell and Doyer Streets within the Canal-Bowery limits also included; we lived on Baxter Street, which is one block over from Mulberry, but it was enough so that we weren't officially in Chinatown). It wasn't as if Chinatown in that period grew so rapidly: it couldn't, so there was an enclosed quality about Chinatown. And that was what my father wanted to document.

Ever since my mother had her mini-stroke in August, i've spent a lot of time with my family, and it has provoked a lot of memories and emotions. And sometimes there were amusing realizations. Yesterday, for example, i realized that my sister and i knew our great-grandmother (my paternal grandmother's mother) but my cousins and my younger brother didn't, because my great-grandmother died when we were about four, so either they were just born or weren't born yet. There are photos of my sister and me with our great-grandmother; i remember that they lived on the second floor of 65 Mott Street (my grandparents lived on the fifth floor).

My father's family is fairly transparent, in the sense that we certainly knew my grandmother, but my mother's family is rather mysterious. Not because we didn't know our aunts and uncles (we certainly did) and our cousins, but because our grandfather was a nonexistent character in our lives. We never seemed to have met him, even though he died after we were born. But there are no photos of him with us. And he's not at my parents' wedding. In fact, we were under the impression that he must have died before our parents' wedding. But that doesn't seem to be the case.

I'll have to give some of my impressions of the New York Film Festival at another time.

2009-09-05T21:09:00.000-07:00

Watching "I Aim at the Stars"; it's one of those movies remembered from childhood, yet it's rather more complicated than memory served, because there are all these arguments about patriotism/nationalism and science.

In the last few weeks, i've either seen some new movies , or movies have opened which i saw a while ago. There are some interesting compare and contrast items among these new releases.

First i'll start with two new Argentine releases, Lucretia Martel's "The Headless Woman" and Lisandro Alonso's "Liverpool".

Alonso is one of the recent directors (i would also include the Dardenne Brothers and Pedro Costa) whose films are rooted in an aesthetic which is a development from neo-realism. There is the attempt to create (mostly through images and sounds, not really through dialogue) an impression of life from what used to be called the lumpen-proletariat. In "Liverpool" (as in Alonso's earlier feature "Los Muertos") the protagonist is on a journey; he is seeking to go home, but finds that it is more difficult than he realized. But the journey is realized in images of eerily composed isolation: the sailor (traveling) is often dwarfed by snowy roads. The attempt is to articulate those emotions which are present in the environment which are are congruent with the emotions of those who cannot articulate in words.

Lucretia Martel's work is from a different angle, because her work is about a different strata of society. Her style is also one which does not depend on fully articulated dialogue, but not because her protagonists are the lumpen-proles, but because her characters are the bourgeoisie who refuse responsibility for the imbalance in power. In "The Headless Woman", her protagonist is a woman who may (or may not) have caused an accident, but her actions then proceed as a way to hide from, to mask any responsibility.

One thing: in thinking about Lucretia Martel's work, i was reminded on the work of Leopoldo Torre-Nilsson, who was the most prominent Argentine director of the 1950s and 1960s. His films were also about the irresponsibility and the rigid social structure of the Argentine bourgeoisie.

Finally caught up with Claire Denis's "35 Shots of Rum" (which i missed at this year's Rendez-vous With French Cinema). In many ways, a lovely film. But somewhere in the background there is the template of Ozu's "Late Spring" in this story of a middle-aged metro conductor living on the outskirts of Paris, and his adult daughter. In the beginning of the film, he returns home and presents his daughter with the gift of an electric rice-cooker; that rice-cooker is a sort of symbol of the Japanese geneology of the narrative.

But when i realized that "Late Spring" was the referent, i was reminded that earlier this year, Doris Dorrie's "Cherry Blossoms" was released, another European film in which an Ozu film is referred to (and quite explicitly in the cased of "Cherry Blossoms"): "Cherry Blossoms" is a movie about a retired couple who go to visit their three grown children (the younger son has a job in Tokyo, which prompts a visit to Japan). One problem that "Cherry Blossoms" has (which "45 Shots of Rum" avoids) is that Doris Dorrie's film is an explicit "remake" of Ozu's "Tokyo Story", and at times, some of the incidents seem strained because Dorrie is trying too hard to find an equivalent to incidents in Ozu's original.

I thought of the fact that, in both cases, Denis and Dorrie wanted to make a story about "traditional values", i.e., the family unit, and in both cases, they turned to Ozu for inspiration. But is Ozu such a "traditional" filmmaker? He's one of the most stylized filmmakers of all time, yet what are the meanings of his films? Like John Ford, so many of Ozu's films are about the dissolution of family: at the end of "End of Summer", the funeral processional becomes ominous. In "Tokyo Story", the aging parents find out that their family is now dispersed and no longer cohesive; in "Late Spring", the marriage dissolves the unity of the father-daughter bond. And the dissolution is one of great sadness.

This week, Fox ran the pilot episode of "Glee" several times, to build an audience for the series premiere next week. But this morning, i watched a documentary "Battle of the High Schooll Musicals: Guys and Divas", and it was amusing to see so many of the elements satirized in "Glee" being based in real life.

2009-08-30T18:14:00.000-07:00

Another weekend spent with my mother; next weekend will be Labor Day and it'll mark the end of summer. This has not been an easy summer. Yesterday (Saturday, August 29) my mother and i watched the news coverage of Ted Kennedy's funeral.

Last week, one of the movies that opened was "Taking Woodstock" directed by Ang Lee. On Thursday, August 20, there was a reception at the UBS Gallery for a retrospective exhibition of Jack Tworkov; it was one of the few artworld events of the last year. Mary Heilman, Chuck Close, Maureen O'Connor, David Diao, Amanda Church, Charlie Finch were among the people spotted in the crowd.

The occasion for the exhibition was the publication of selected writings by Tworkov (by Yale University Press); Mira Schor is the editor. Tworkov was a fascinating artist: he began in the 1930s as a realist of the American scene, and then by the 1940s became an abstractionist; by the 1960s, he had already moved into geometric abstraction. As an artist, he was continually evolving his style. The kind of inventiveness of his career seems to be so typical of the New York School of artists, especially of the 1950s and 1960s; but by the end of the 1960s, many younger artists (Frank Stella, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, et al) began to have retrospectives at major museums, and this caused an early calcification of their styles. They began to become associated with a specific product, and they became manufacturers of that product. (It was like this spring, when the Whitney had that Oldenburg show, and Oldenburg was asked if there were any new objects which caught his imagination, and he said no. Computers, cell-phones, i-pods: his mind remains in the 1950s, with the old typewriters, erasers, irons.)

Someone i ran into at the Tworkov reception was saying that there's a lot of interest in the artworld of the 1960s. In the NY Times Book Review, there's a review of a book by Jenny Diski, "The Sixties", yet another memoir about that era. The reviewer, Elsa Dixler, makes the point that the political perspective from England is very different: in the US, there were the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the feminist and gay liberation movements. One of the problems with so many of the investigations into the 1960s is that, too often, the writers are conservatives who have no interest in the possibilities of change.

Everyone knows that the times have changed. But sometimes it seems as if it's hard to find anyone who will stick up for the 1960s, for the changes that so many of us believed in.

Too many people have been saying that Ted Kennedy's death marks the end of an era. Well, the same thing could be said of Merce Cunningham's death. Or Karl Malden's death. Or Ellie Greenwich's death. Or Dominick Dunne's death. Or Michael Jackson's death.

But there remain a lot of us who continue to live with the ideals from the mid-century, and we're still around.

2009-08-17T20:13:00.000-07:00

It has been almost a month since i've blogged; it has been a rather traumatic time.

More than three weeks ago, i was awakened by my brother (on the telephone) telling me that he was at my mother's, they were rushing her to the doctor's, she had blacked out and fallen and hit her head. She was bleeding profusely but she had regained consciousness.

So it's been very difficult. However, in the interim, i've gone to a few screenings and i've watched TCM's Summer Under the Stars as a distraction.

Today is Jennifer Jones day; in the morning, i watched "Ruby Gentry" (one of the best of the latter King Vidor films, certainly the most cohesive of the overheated melodramas of his late period) and "Indiscretion of an American Wife" (even in the David O. Selznick cut, an intriguing attempt to create a middleclass drama in a location setting, and there are wonderful moments courtesy of De Sica and Zavattini); then it was onto the gym and then getting a few things and then onto my mother's. And when i got there, i watched the end of "Love Letters" (Singleton!) and then "Portrait of Jennie" and now "Carrie". Jennifer Jones remains one of the most vexing of stars: there are many detractors who felt that she was being pushed because of David O. Selznick's interest in her, and then there are others who are just fans. Many years ago, i remember that Andrew Sarris ranked her as the one star who definitely was more beautiful in person than she ever seemed on the screen (and in many movies, such as "Duel in the Sun" and "Carrie" and "Ruby Gentry", she's certainly beautiful).

There are many incidental pleasures to be found whiling away the time watching TCM. For example: seeing "The Secret People" in conjunction with other movies with Audrey Hepburn makes you realize that she was actually a tall woman. In "The Secret People", she fairly towers over Valentina Cortese (who plays her sister) and Serge Reggiani (playing Cortese's boyfriend). But in her American movies, most of her co-stars (Gregory Peck, William Holden, Henry Fonda and Mel Ferrer, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant) were among the taller men in Hollywood; Hepburn learned very fast to always wear flats, though she had ramrod posture (the result of all those years of dance training) and loved to use her neck (that's why it was important for her to appear with tall men, so that she could look up to them, stretching her neck). Watching Deborah Kerr day, it was amazing to see her in "The Day Will Dawn" (from 1942, and a movie i'd never seen) and "I Met a Dark Stranger" (a.k.a. "The Adventuress" from 1946) and "The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp" (from 1945): she's rather robust and she's certainly energetic! And she has a ripe, full-lipped beauty in those movies, which MGM did a lot to try to dampen once they got ahold of her in 1947 with "The Hucksters". MGM wanted a "lady" and Deborah Kerr really wasn't that remote. MGM thought she was another Greer Garson (another redhead from the British Isles), and almost wrecked her career sticking her in things like "Quo Vadis" and "King Solomon's Mines" and "The Prisoner of Zenda" (though those films were popular).

The Cary Grant day was predictable but fun nevertheless: what's not to like about "To Catch a Thief" and "Notorious" and "Houseboat"? With James Mason, it was fun seeing movies like "The Wicked Lady" and "The Seventh Veil": glowering, glamorous, and reeking of evil! That's similar to some of the movies on Dirk Bogarde day: "The Blue Lamp" (it's easy to see why Bogarde was a sensation when that movie was released in 1950), "The Servant", "Our Mother's House" and "Darling".

It's very interesting to see a whole day's worth of a movie career: some people really found their image and stuck to it (true of Cary Grant) while others really tried to stretch after an initial typecasting (true of James Mason and Dirk Bogarde).

Over the past few weeks, there have been some wonderful articles in various journals. In Film Quarterly, there's an excellent piece on Dreyer's "Vampyr"; online, The New Republic has posted several short sections of an interview with Stanley Kauffmann, and he makes some very provocative statements. When asked if there's anything he regrets, he notes that he regrets that he vastly undeestimated Godard. Kauffmann admits he didn't appreciate what Godard was bringing to the cinema, and now that he's had the chance to review many of the films (because of the revivals that Rialto has done of such films as "Band of Outsiders" and "2 or 3 Things I Know About Her"), he sees what he missed in the 1960s. And when asked about the film he wishes he could see for the first time now, he makes the point that every classic contains more in it than can be grasped at once, but if he had to choose, he would want to experience "L'Avventura" for the first time, because he remembers how seismic that experience was to his whole understanding and appreciation of film.

Anyway, watching "Portrait of Jennie" again at my mother's, it reminded me of the fact that the first time i ever saw that film it was when i was a child and watching the movie on TV. Some kids never grow up (not if they keep watching Turner Classic Movies).

2009-07-28T18:37:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was a day of shocks. In the NY Times, Alastair Macaulay reviewed the current season at Jacob's Pillow, and he concluded with a long paean to Merce Cunningham's company which had just performed. Then the news broke: Merce Cunningham had died on Sunday night, July 26. Right after the performances at Jacob's Pillow; he died at home.

It wasn't unexpected (in a way) because he was 90, but in April, after his borthday, there was an article in the NY Times about how Cunningham was preparing for the continuation of his company. A number of the "senior" dancers had been let go, and the company was preparing for the revival of certain dances, and a performance schedule was being set up for the company. In the article, it stated that there was a timetable of about two years, and then Cunningham felt his legacy would be complete, and that was it.

As it happened, after reading the first of the many items about Cunningham's death, i picked up Carolyn Brown's "Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years With Cage and Cunningham"; i opened it at random, and came across: 'The beliefs: "Dancing is a spiritual exercise in physical form" (Merce Cunningham)....'

So much for "chance" procedures. It's been so long, it's hard to remember how important "chance" was to the arts as an alternative to traditional methods of composition; this was particularly true in terms of music and dance. And at the forefront of "chance" procedures was John Cage.

It is difficult to sort out the type of "influence" that Cunningham had on the world of dance, because his singularity has persisted into the 21st Century. Others of his generation (Sybil Shearer, Anna Halprin, Paul Taylor, James Waring) did some startling, unusual things. But for some reason Cunningham continued to evolve in terms of his aesthetic. It's also hard for those of us who came to dance in the 1960s: by then, Cunningham was the old master, and a new generation of dancers (Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, Steve Paxton, et al) came to the fore, and were proving to be ever more radical.

Yet when i close my eyes, i can see Cunningham spinning, his arms and hands darting with sharp, sudden thrusts, his feet scampering swiftly. I see that lean body in a leotard, a body that seemed almost boneless and certainly weightless.

And now he's really gone.

On a more personal note, i was alerted by Stephen Kent Jusick of MIX NYC that Robert Hilferty had died. this was really a shock, because Robert was only in his 50s. He had been a critic for Bloomberg News, and also wrote for publications like The Advocate. But i'll remember Robert as an activist filmmaker, part of the ACT-UP faction, whose video "Stop the Church" was an impassioned documentation of the gay protests at St. Patrick's Cathedral.

So a day of sadness.

Woke up to a huge obit to Cunningham by Alastair Macaulay in the NY Times, but on TCM, "On With the Show", the 1929 Warners musical which i thought had been lost. But there it was, not in color, perhaps (it had originally been shot in two-tone Technicolor, but all Technicolor prints have been lost, though there is reputedly at least one segment that has been found in color), but it does have Ethel Waters singing "Am I Blue?" And who needs anything else?

2009-07-22T20:11:00.001-07:00

It has been a while since i've blogged; a few weeks ago, there was an article about the fact that most blogs peter out after six months. I've been going at this for more than four years now. One thing i find is that there is a tendency to repeat: because there's no context, i find myself trying to create the same arguments from scratch.

A while ago, i was asked by Iain Stott (whose blog is The One Line Review: www.1linereview.blogspot.com) to participate in his poll of the "50 Greatest Films". Like most people undertaking these kinds of polls, he was hoping to find diversity: he was hoping his list wouldn't duplicate other lists (such as the Sight & Sound poll which happens every decade), and so he tried to ask people who would not be asked; as he noted, it was a cross-section of professional film writers and amateurs.

When the "new" editors of Sight & Sound prepared the 2002 poll, one of the things they did was to leave out a number of critics who had participated in decades past (certainly, since the 1960s) and reach out to critics from other countries (particularly from Asia). But the problem with this was: 1) there was an assumption that older critics wouldn't be aware of recent currents in cinema, which i don't think is the case; 2) there was an assumption that critics from Asia (for example) would list films which would not be immediately accessible to the West, thereby creating alternatives to the traditional lists. But this assumption is misguided, because in Asian cultures, the place of tradition remains very powerful, and so those people who have studied film history would have studied the same "classics" as everyone else ("Citizen Kane", "La Regle du jeu", et al). The point is: for most people, there must be an acknowledgement of some sort of standards; individual lists may vary (enormously) but the consensus has remained constant.

The consensus which has developed since the 1990s is one which has (already) upended values, and that is something that has not been explored. It's simply accepted.

But Iain Stott's blog should be checked out.

In the past few weeks, death has been omnipresent in the news. Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett (of course). The artist Dash Snow. Walter Cronkite. Frank McCourt. Gordon Waller (of Peter and Gordon). I'm sure there were many more notables, but those immediately came to mind. It was astounding to see the coverage of Michael Jackson's death (there remain hiccups on CNN and - of course - E!) which seemed to be endless.

This week brought the anniversary of the first walk on the moon, and there was a lot about this on the news. But one astounding fact: NASA seems to have lost the original video footage. The video footage that remains is from the transmission over broadcast television.

2009-07-07T20:05:00.000-07:00

Today was all Michael Jackson, all the time. Nothing more to add, but it was annoying, since the news in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, in Asia, was minimized at a time when there was so much going on. And in terms of death: Robert McNamara's death was dealt with in a very cursory fashion. Yet in terms of actual world events, McNamara remains one of the most significant figures of the 20th Century, as his doctrine of the preemptive strike as a weapon of anti-Communism became the touchstone of the Vietnam War, one of the most wrenching episodes in American history. He and Henry Kissinger were the architects of the Vietnam War, but McNamara had the decency (as documented in Errol Morris's "The Fog of War") to admit the horrors that the country was plunged in because of the war, and to question whether the war was "right".

Of course, Kissinger remains, not so much unrepentant, but utterly convinced of his correctness in all matters. There was a documentary which opened the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, "The Reckoning", which detailed the working of the World Court in Amsterdam, and how the US has tried to block the court, and (in fact) have tried to undermine and destroy the court. And the reason is that, according to international law (which the US had signed during the 1990s), Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush are all war criminals. And so the US is trying to undermine international law because our leaders are war criminals.

And the Sarah Palin saga just gets more insane: turns out that she is trying to evade all the cases that have been filed against her for various ethical infractions during her term as governor of Alaska. Her understanding of the law is so hilariously limited that she thinks that if she stops being governor, that all the lawsuits will just have to go away.

(That's as hilarious as Peggy Noonan's declaration that Ronald Reagan was a great intellect; i wonder what would happen to Peggy Noonan if she had ever met Ludwig Wittgenstein, or Claude Levi-Strauss, or Simone de Beauvoir; i know in De Beauvoir's case, she'd sniff and declare De Beauvoir a Communist.)

There's been so many movies over the past few weeks (months, even), but it's hard to know what to think. The reason? The insistence on pop above all else. The way that Michael Jackson has dominated the news in the last week.

I'm reminded of Susan Sontag's essay "The Pornographic Imagination", in which she argues that some works which can be considered "pornographic" need to be acknowledged as works of literary merit. 'Not only do Pierre Louys' "Trois Filles de leur Mere," George Bataille's "Histoire de l'Oeil" and "Madame Edwarda," the pseudonymous "Story of O" and "The Image" belong to literature, but it can be made clear why these books, all five of them, occupy a much higher rank as literature than "Candy" or Oscar Wilde's "Teleny" or the Earl of Rochester's "Sodom" or Appolinaire's "The Debauched Hospodar" or Cleland's "Fanny Hill." The avalanche of pornographic potboilers marketed for two centuries under and, now, increasingly, over the counter no more impugns the status of literature of the first group of pornographic books than the proliferation of books of the caliber of "The Carpetbaggers" and "Valley of the Dolls" throws into question the credentials of "Anna Karenina" and "The Great Gatsby" and "The Man Who Loved Children."' But just as the last two decades have seen the change in values in terms of literary precepts, so critical debates have been superceded by an acceptance which has undermined all values. Sontag: "Only when English and American critics evolve a more sophisticated view of literature will an interesting debate get underway. (In the end, this debate would not only be about pornography but about the whole body of contemporary literature insistently focused on extreme situation and behavior.)" And (of course) this has happened, so that there is a whole school of thought which only seems to value abjection, degradation and extremism.

One Andy Warhol who upends all values is fine, but when the field is crowded with too many wannabe Andy Warhols (Jeff Koons, Mark Kostabi, etc.), then the field is nullified.

2009-06-25T20:11:00.001-07:00

Pop culture is quite ephemeral: Farrah Fawcett died around noon in LA, and three hours later, Michael Jackson died. But the hyperbole is a little much.

The interesting thing is that, right now, there's an emphasis on how Michael Jackson was the most famous entertainer of the 20th Century. I hate this kind of hyperbole: if the worldwide saturation of attention is an indication, then the most famous entertainer of the 20th Century remains Charlie Chaplin. And (yes) there is an analogy: Chaplin was also noted for rather unsavory relations with minors. (Paulette Goddard was actually not an anomaly. The other day, i was researching her life, and came across the fact - which i had known but had forgotten - that she had been a Ziegfeld Follies chorine at the age of 15, when she married a millionaire; three years later, when she was 18, she divorced her first husband and received a million dollar settlement, whereupon she and her mother went to L.A. where they invested in real estate. Goddard met Chaplin shortly after, and they claimed to have married in China or Vietnam or somewhere but no marriage license was ever found. Chaplin then starred Goddard in "Modern Times" in 1936, when she was already 23 or 24, but he'd already been with her since she was a teenager.)

The problem is that there is too much deification going on in the way people regard the arts. A lot of it has to do with the need people have for spirituality, but there's an insistence on creating an image of the artist as hero, and there's no middle ground.

But certainly an odd day. In addition: Hanne Hiob died; she was Bertolt Brecht's daughter, a few months ago, Stefan Brecht died. Ed McMahon also died. Ed McMahon's death was very sad: he left a lot of debts, and his wife had to move out of the house as soon as he died. Very sad.

2009-06-18T11:54:00.000-07:00

There was an article about a week ago, about how more than 80% of blogs have slowed down. A lot of people just aren't posting anymore. It's like hula-hoops or pet rocks: a fad.

But the reason i haven't blogged recently is that i'm stumped. I've been going to press screenings, but since the Tribeca Film Festival, it's been a tough slog. Also: i must be on another schedule, because i'm not running into people. And the feeling of isolation is starting to get to me. There's so much that's now causing the theatrical experience to disintegrate, but going to the movies was always some sort of communal experience: it wasn't just sitting in a theater as part of an audience, it was going to the movies with people. When i was a child, my grandmother took me to the movies, along with my sister. And even watching movies on TV, i always did that with my sister. (One big memory was watching "The Third Man" on TV with my father and sister, and my father was explaining about post-WWII Europe - he was stationed in Berlin in 1947, so he was part of the Occupation forces - and he talked about the bombed-out buildings, and the rubble. We must have been about six or seven at the time. I'll always love "The Third Man" for that reason; also "The Fallen Idol" because my father loved that movie: he thought Ralph Richardson was the greatest actor he'd ever seen.)

A note about the weather: this is one of the soggiest Junes on record in New York City. Average rainfall for June is about two inches; we're already past six inches, and there's no (real) end in sight. It's just rain, rain, rain, rain, rain. And when it gets really bad, it's impossible to get around. For some reason, subway service slows down (if not outright stops) in the outer boroughs, and since i'm now in Brooklyn, this is a real problem. On Tuesday, June 9, there was a press screening of "Brighton Rock"; the screening was at Film Forum. Well: it should take me about 45-50 minutes to get there from my house. There was a deluge that morning, and when i got to the subway station, it was obvious there was a delay. So i just went home. Today (Thursday, June 18), there was a press screening of "Les Plages d'Agnes", also at Film Forum. Also a deluge this morning, but i went anyway... but i waited for the D Express at 36th Street Brooklyn; three N Expresses went by, and by that time, it was 10:40 AM; there was no way that i would get to the West 4th Street Manhattan station by 11, so i would be late to the screening, so i just turned around and came home. Of course, it was lucky: i'd seen both "Brighton Rock" and "Les Plages d'Agnes" before, but still, i feel like i'm cursed never to be able to get to Film Forum!

(If i were going to The Museum of Modern Art or the Walter Reade Theater, i could take either the D or the N train, but with Film Forum, it's the D train to West 4th.)

Oh, well, and it's still raining.

Yesterday it was a clear (thought cloudy) day, and i had to wait in the morning for the National Grid person to come and do the annual boiler check. And on Turner Classic Movies (this month is dedicated to "Great Directors") it was Tony Richardson day. Started with "The Charge of the Light Brigade", then "The Sailor From Gibraltar". I really wanted to see that again, because... my question is: why is it a bad movie? Why is it that "The Sailor From Gibraltar" and Jules Dassin's "10:30 PM Summer" don't work as movies, yet Duras's own writing for the movies (the screenplays for "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and "Une Aussi Longue Absence") and her novels and her own movies ("La Musica", "Destroy, She Said", "Nathalie Granger", "India Song" and "Le Camion") are quite remarkable. What is wrong with "The Sailor From Gibraltar" and "10:30 PM Summer"?

I also watched Richardson's 1969 version of "Hamlet" (boy, that Nicol Williamson sure does talk fast!).

Then i went to the press screening of the documentary "Afghan Star". This movie played at the recent Human Rights Watch Film Festival, but i missed it then. Jeff Lunger joined me for the press screening, and after we went to a coffee shop and discussed the movie. The movie was one of those barely functional digital works, but the subject was fascinating: it was about how a fractured, war-torn culture (Afghanistan) can be united by... pop (in this case, a version of "Pop/American Idol"). One of the things Jeff and i talked about was the idea of the "hook", that angle of the documentary which enticed people to fund it. (In this case, it was obvious that the British Channel 4 funders were interested in the conjunction of the exotic nature of an alien "pop" culture, and the political implications. For instance, of the four final contestants, two were women, even though the Taliban has made it explicit that women are not allowed to sing or dance in public. One of the women gets carried away in her song, and she lets her head scarf fall and she dances at the end of her song... and of course, there's death threats and denunciations and hysteria. But "Afghan Idol" is defying the Taliban.) But Jeff and i also discussed the fact that there are so many documentaries being made, but there seems to be a lack of passion about most of them.

I missed the Great Performances broadcast of the concert version of "Chess". I remember when "Chess" was first done in London, and that was one of the two musicals that Mary Lucier became obsessed with (the other was "Cats"). I saw some version of "Chess" (was it on Broadway?) and a few years later, i remember going to an off-off-Broadway production of "Chess". But i'll have to catch "Chess" when it's rebroadcast.

Well, i didn't get to "Les Plages d'Agnes" but it's Jules Dassin day on TCM, and i'm watching "Topkapi" (which i had seen as a child). Too bad TCM didn't show "10:30 PM Summer" but i have that on DVD. This evening, TCM will be doing Francois Truffaut.

This week, i also saw two films by Sissako, the director from Mali; his films also raise some interesting questions, because the dramatic structure is flat, and his films seem to dribble away (his films don't really have endings, they just stop) yet what are the compensations? And there are compensations. I'd already seen "Waiting for Happiness" (and i was surprised at how much i remember of that film; i have to admit that the images are quite haunting) but not "Life on Earth" and what was illuminating was that the same situation (the one-thing-follows-another style, without any dramatic conclusion) which i had found in "Waiting for Happiness" was also in "Life on Earth". Anyway, there's going to be a retrospective of his work at MoMA.

In terms of Agnes Varda: it seems that she and Chris Marker (who has been a close friend of hers since the 1950s) have reached the point where they can simply record their feelings and thoughts with unsurpassed ease. But it's like Chris Marker is viewed as such an intellectual, while Agnes Varda is not (yet her work, such as "La Pointe Courte" or "Sans Toit ni Loi", is certainly as rigorous and as intellectual as anything by her compatriots Alain Resnais or Marker). Yet it reminds me of the situation when Claude Simon won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and Mary Mccarthy remarked, "What? Not Nathalie Sarraute?" And this takes me back to Margeurite Duras...

2009-05-20T06:05:00.001-07:00

Last night, it was: "American Idol", "Dancing With the Stars" and Joseph Losey's "The Lawless" on Turner Classic Movies. Oh, and the premiere of "Glee". TV doesn't get more exciting than that. ("Glee" reminded me of nothing as much as Ryan Murphy's initial foray into TVland, the WB series "Popular", only with musical numbers. Have to admit the glee club rendition of "Rehab" was certainly unusual.)

Larry made the observation that "American Idol" and "Dancing With the Stars" shouldn't really be listed as "reality shows" in so far as they are talent competitions, of which there is a huge history, all the way back to Major Bowes and Ted Mack. ("Sing out, Louise!")

2009-05-15T11:23:00.001-07:00

It's been more than three weeks since i've even attempted to write anything on this blog. And a lot has happened.

One thing that happened was the Tribeca Film Festival. This year, it was streamlined, less films (not over 100) and there was a feeling of concentration. And it seems as if each year, the festival gets better and better. One reason is that the options for distribution and exhibition are in such flux, and people are looking for alternatives, and because it's relatively new, Tribeca is the alternative.

And the flux of the current situation cannot be overestimated. The economic downturn actually hit many nonprofits before the fall of 2008; there were difficulties with even many established organizations in terms of fundraising, and that has only intensified. And so (taking as two examples) the once Rockfeller Intercultural Film/Video program (which went through several name changes) is now part of the Tribeca All-Access program. And the part of the Tribeca All-Access which has a script development program (for "minorities") is now working in conjunction with the IFP. (And the other part of the script development program at the IFP is now part of the Sundance Institute.)

The continual changes in the field are sometimes bewildering, because it's not as if there aren't filmmakers out there who need help. The other day, Reid Rosefeld (on his new blog - http://speedcine.com/blog) wondered about the whole process of online marketing, and how in the history of film, there's always those filmmakers who never knew how to market themselves, but does that mean their work should just be ignored? Even someone like Robert Bresson was very canny about marketing himself. But Marcel Hanoun (for example) was a disaster at it. Last year, most people were impressed by "Frozen River", and that's an independent film which went through the whole process of development through various organizations (like the IFP) in order to go from a short film to a feature. And Courtney Hunt needed that kind of help. And now that most of those programs have been shuttered, what can people do?

And yet people continue to make films. And one of the things is that people are no longer looking to Hollywood. Movies like "Treeless Mountain" and "The Exploding Girl" (as well as Soderberg's "The Girlfriend Experience") are trying to find new ways of finding an audience.

But there's a lot: Tribeca and New Directors/New Films (also very good this year). A lot of people i know (those that still have jobs as film critics or curators) are now in Cannes, and there's been a lot of speculation about this year's festival. Will it confirm the downward trend of the cinema? Or will it reveal new modes of distribution and exhibition?

It's hard to tell, but i'm feeling optimistic, after seeing movies that i actually liked. But then i looked at various blogs and online film reviews, and i was flummoxed: what the hell are these people thinking about? It's like so much online is simply an assertion of taste: "i like"; "i don't like". But there's little reasoning why. And not only that, but there's no sense of a system of values which inform the particular taste. Why is this film "good"? What aesthetic criteria do these people apply?

In the past, film critics applied criteria which derived from more traditional artforms: theater, literature, the visual arts, music. And there was a whole history of those artforms. But now, we are confronted with people who are barbarians, who seem never to have read a book (one film critic, who has been employed by an entertainment magazine for more than a decade, has stated that he never reads a book if a movie is based on it; he admitted he rarely reads books at all!), who've never gone to the theater, whose taste in music starts at Elvia Presley (if that), and who know all about "graphic novels" but have no knowledge of painting. And then they say, oh, this movie is good. But why is it good? What are you comparing it to? How is the experience of this film unique?

And it finally gets depressing. For example: i remember that the reviews for "My Fair Lady" were mostly laudatory in the daily newspapers, but the more serious critics mostly panned it. And the pans for the movie were based, not on a platonic ideal, but on an actual film which was as much a Shavian ideal as possible. And Audrey Hepburn's performance was all wrong: she couldn't help it, but Audrey Hepburn was a lady (in actuality, she was a noble, since her mother was a baroness) and she couldn't shake that. But you can't explain this to people now, because all those distinctions are now (seemingly) moot.

But they're not, and that's why Larry and i are finding the BBC series "Any Dream Will Do" so fascinating. It's seeing these kids who are desperate for a show business career, and when most of them speak, their accents are so... uncultivated, to say the least.

But this year, "American Idol" has been fascinating, because there's such a back story. The Christian right seized on "American Idol" as if it were a referendum (they want to turn everything into a referendum) on gay rights. Danny Gokey was chosen by the Christian right as the hardworking straight man with the tragic past (his wife died last year), and Adam Lambert was the devil, because he was gay. Well: this past week, there was a vote for the final two, and it turned out to be Kris Allen and Adam Lambert. The Christian right could not mobilize enough votes for Danny Gokey.

Oh, well, it's true, the US is going to hell.

2009-04-21T21:49:00.001-07:00

Over the winter, i started growing two avocados (sticking the pits halfway in a cup of water), and both grew very nicely. One grew to over two feet tall! So at the end of March, Larry decided to plant it: he got a pot, he got some potting soil, and he planted the tall avocado. And then he decided to put it outside. Well: since January, New York City has had one of the worst winters on record. January almost set some sort of record: there wasn't a single day when the temperature went above freezing. And February continued the cold. And then it went into March! Well, the avocado spent a few days outside when one night the temperature went below freezing (again) and the plant immediately died.

Well, i'm like that avocado. The last month, my body has revolted against the cold and... i haven't been able to go out. All sorts of problems. It's just horrible. Finally, the last few days have been seasonable (not freezing) and today i actually started feeling much better.

Be that as it may, i did see a bunch of movies, i've also watched TV. Over the weekend, a friend asked me about art criticism on the web, and i mentioned Walter Robinson (ArtNet) and John Perrault and Jeff Weinstein (the ArtsJournal weblog). And it was funny because it made me look at the stuff on ArtNet and on Artopia (Perreault) and Out There (Weinstein). I was glad to see that Jeff Weinstein has been enjoying "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" as much as i have.

But it's like usually i follow various film blogs, such as Flickgrrl (Carrie Rickey), Thompson on Hollywood (Anne Thompson), Film Journey (Doug Cummings), The Passionate Moviegoer (Joe Baltake), Cine-Journal (George Robinson), Popsurfing (Michael Giltz), and Dave Kehr. And (of course) there's Facebook, which is like a world unto itself!

When i was watching the HBO movie "Grey Gardens", i was struck by the problem of tone: so much of the social scene that was depicted in the 1950s just seemed off. (The film was better when it concentrated on the pair alone in the house; the airlessness, the lack of social perspective and the enclosed timelessness seemed appropriate, but when other people were around, it was hard to tell exactly what they were supposed to be. That is: they didn't seem to be New Yorkers of the 1950s. In fact, it wrecked havoc on my memory, because it didn't resemble anything like New York in the 1950s, and i grew up there.) And it reminded me of the problems i had when i was watching Scorsese's "The Age of Innocence": it was the kind of movie where every superficial detail was just-about-perfect, yet every nuance, every social/cultural/political context just seemed ever-so-slightly off. Just as an example: Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder just sounded wrong. Their accents were not upper-class New York. Yet no one seems to notice these things. And Joanne Woodward was exactly the wrong person to get as the narrator: though she has a trained actor's voice, she's Southern, and that keeps slipping through.

And i've been reading so much online film criticism (or what passes for film criticism) and i'm just appalled. These people seem to have no knowledge of... anything! Except movies. And somehow, movies aren't enough.

But i'm hoping i start feeling better and i really want to start going out again!

2009-04-07T07:27:00.001-07:00

Avocados are the most difficult plants to try to maintain. We had three that we put in our room for the winter: two of them are fine, one of them suddenly started to shrivel up. And there's no difference in temperature, we water them all the same. And there are two new ones which we had in water... we planted one and put it outside last week. Well, the minute the weather went below 40 degrees, that plant's leaves turned all brown and it seems to be dying.

Today there was the second press screening of "Leon Morin, Pretre" and i planned to go, but when i woke up i had... it almost felt like a cramp in my stomach. However, i shall proceed.

From my memory: the reason i wanted to see "Leon Morin, Pretre" again was that it seemed to me that in his early films (from "Le Silence de la Mer" to "Leon Morin, Pretre", and that includes the two "thrillers" "Bob le Flambeur" and "Deux Hommes dans Manhattan"), Jean-Pierre Melville is always dealing with displacement, and that displacement has to do with the overwhelming emotion of something "forbidden" contrasted with the surface of activity. In "Le Silence de la Mer", the girl and her grandfather refuse to change their routines, as a way of silently protesting the presence of the Nazi officer. And the commentary reveals those emotions which cannot be stated.

And in "Leon Morin, Pretre", the ambivalence which is at the center of Melville's work runs riot: there is Barny's attraction to the priest, but also Barny's interest in other women which is enforced because of the absence of a lot of the men in the town. The Occupation creates an enclosed, claustrophobic atmosphere (rather like the various underworlds in Melville's thrillers, with their codes of honor and their rigid rules). Another thing in Melville: his enclosed worlds have their own rules (like the games that the twins play in their room in "Les Enfants Terribles"), and these rules are often a subversion of the traditional rules that exist outside (thus, the gangsters and thieves have their own protocols, just as the police do, and these rules often mimic each other, as in "Le Cercle Rouge").

But i've been thinking about Melville... and also about Harry Smith because i went to the screening of "Film #23" which turned out to be an incredible work. And what was so fascinating about "Film #23" was that the information about how the film came to be (it was supposed to be a singular work, one copy only which was then to be sold as a "unique" art object, but Harry didn't then destroy the materials he used... he just didn't label them, but left them among his effects). And what Harry used was: footage of couples which he shot (some of which was used in "Mahagonny"), what seems to be discarded footage from the period of "Early Abstractions", discarded footage from the period of "Late Superimpositions", etc. You'd think, from the way this sounds, this would have been a mish-mash, but it wasn't! The absolute care with which the various layers are played off against each other, the rhythms of the editing which match the rhythms of the music Harry chose to accompany the film (the late 1930s Kurt Weill score "Little Johnny Johnston" which began as a New Federal Theater project: very a propos in this economic climate), all of these are just so perfectly combined.

Some other things i've seen recently: the premiere episode (a 2-hour movie) of "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" (the last work directed by Anthony Minghella, and very charming; it's one of Minghella's better works, and it's good that it's based on material which isn't so fancy and pretentious, because Minghella was able to use his visual skills - the film was shot in Botswana, and it's a beautiful country - and his skill with actors on "light" material, and the results show what a fine crafstman he could be when he wasn't trying for poetic profundity, which weighed down and ultimately sank "Cold Mountain"); the Basil Dearden thriller "All Night Long" (especially noteworthy because of the appearance of so many wonderful jazz musicians, including Dave Brubeck, Charles Mingus and John Dankworth); the Jamie Kennedy documenatry "Heckler" (which turned into a screed, not about heckling, but about critics).

Wouter Barendrecht died on Sunday: a real shock! Since we haven't been going to any international festivals in at least four years (at least since we've moved), we haven't really had a chance to run into Wouter. But during those crazy days of the IFP Market (especially the late 1980s), Wouter was working for the Berlin Film Festival, and he was also trying to get Fortissimo off the ground. The idea of Fortissimo Films was very ambitious (certainly, at that time): he would help to finance, produce and distribute films by artists from around the world. The model was sort of the Hubert Bals Fund, but Wouter really felt that there had to be a way to get the films (once completed) to festivals, and into distribution around the world.

But his death was very sudden. When he was starting Fortissimo, he worked very closely with Norman Wang and Sophie Gluck, because Norman and Sophie were the people who handled a lot of the cinema coming out of Asia (China, Hong Kong, Taiwan), and Wouter felt that this was an area where exciting cinema was developing. But Wouter's sudden death was very shocking, and very sad. He was only 45. But he did make Fortissimo into a real force in world cinema. And there's a staff, and the work he started will continue, but it's still sad, because he was the person who had the vision. And that's something that's hard to replace.

2009-04-02T18:02:00.000-07:00

Frustrations of the MTA. Today i was on my way to the press screening of Jean-Pierre Melville's "Leon Morin, Pretre". I've seen the film before, many years ago, but one reason i wanted to see it again is that since i saw "Leon Morin", i've seen "Le Silence de la Mer" and "L'Armee des Ombres". These three films form a triptych about France during the Occupation, and i had wanted to compare them.

But when i got to the subway station, it was very crowded, which was not a good sign: 9:30 AM during a weekday, there should still be a regular schedule, with trains every five monutes or so. By 9:40, i knew i was in trouble. And, in fact, by the time i got to the 36th Street stop, there was another huge crowd waiting at the station. An N train came, but today i needed the D; another long wait... by the time we were going across the bridge, it was already 10:25! And the screening started at 10:30! There was no way i was going to make it in time, so i got off at the first stop in Manhattan, Grand Street, and went over to see my mother.

Turns out there were massive subway delays on the N and R lines, which i wish someone had told those of us waiting on the damned 77th Street subway stop. Had something to do with signal problems. On the way home, i decided to take the R train from City Hall; i got to the station just as a W train was pulling out. I thought, good, that means the next train will be an R. But no: three W trains later, and there was an announcement (repeated several times) that passengers going downtown should simply take the W because the N and R lines were delayed because of signal problems. Finally, an R train arrived, and what should have been a 45-minute ride took more than an hour. Made me feel like i should never go to Manhattan.

However, i do want to say something about Jean-Pierre Melville. I remember that, years ago, Richard Roud was talking about Melville. Adrienne Mancia was really enthusiastic about his work (and Adrienne would, in fact, program a retrospective at MoMA) and Richard's point was that he felt that Melville's thrillers ("Le Doulos", "Le Deuxieme Souffle", "Le Samourai") were "exercises de style" but that the early films ("Le Silence de la Mer", "Les Enfants Terribles", even, Richard said, "Quand Tu Liras Cette Lettre") had "subjects", that the stylistic experimentation (so apparent in "Le Silence de la Mer" and "Les Enfants Terribles") was used to explore the narratives to maximal effect, but the thrillers were simply a gloss on thriller themes (though Roud did express his admiration for the formal "perfection" of "Le Samourai"). And i remember that Roud felt "Leon Morin, Pretre" was the last "worthwhile" film in Melville's career (but that was before "L'Armee des Ombres"; i never knew what he thought about that film).

Anyway, i missed the screening of "Leon Morin, Pretre" but i still thought about the film.

Yesterday, i watched some of the Jane Powell movies on TCM (on the occasion of her 80th birthday!) and i think my supposition was correct. That is: i do think that Louis B. Mayer wanted to sign Deanne Durbin, and regretted the fact that she already had an option with Universal. Mayer didn't really appreciate Judy Garland (he used to call her the "little dwarf") and forever after kept chasing that kind of juvenile coloratura (that's where Kathryn Grayson and Jane Powell came in). And Mayer wanted so much to emulate the kind of wholesome family entertainments that Joe Pasternak was masterminding at Universal that Mayer eventually hired Pasternak away from Universal, which actually put a crimp in Deanna Durbin's career, because once Pasternak left, no one at Universal knew what to do with Durbin, and she soon retired (permanently).

But watching "Two Weeks With Love" and "Small Town Girl", i was struck by the almost infuriating neatness of the whole enterprise, the engineered wholesomeness, with its moments of poignance and its little shafts of chucklesome humor, its manufactured warmth. It's infuriating because it works! And this pair (along with that chef d'oeuvre "A Date With Judy") show Jane Powell at her height (and the producer was none other than Joe Pasternak!), twinkling and toothy.

Getting back to the MTA: i don't understand why we can't just fire the whole damn board of the MTA, and then put them in jail for malfeasance, mismanagement and misappropriation of public funds. Sometimes i wish we had the Chinese style of justice. When there was the problem of tainted food traced to a Chinese factory, the government simply executed the factory owners. New York City should execute the MTA.

2009-03-18T18:36:00.000-07:00

It's been a hectic three weeks. There have been screenings for New Directors/New Films: i've tried to see as many films as possible. So far, i've seen fifteen of the films, and there are two more days left of press screenings. There have also been movies which opened, which i saw a while ago, most specifically Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Tokyo Sonata" and Jan Troell's "Everlasting Moments" and Matteo Garrone's "Gomorrah".

In the news: about three hours ago, an official statement was issued. Natasha Richardson is dead. The actual cause is still to be determined (she fell during a skiing lesson; was it head trauma? an aneurysm?) but it's very sad.

In terms of the AIG bonus mess: well, Congress is now acting all angry and upset... except that Senator Dodd masterminded the AIG deal which included a codicil for the bonuses in the federal bailout deal. Now that the public is outraged, these senators and congressmen (who were all in the pay of Wall Street in the first place) are trying to act like they're shocked, shocked to find out this has happened. (Anderson Cooper had the funniest line about this, he said that the congressmen are acting like Claude Rains in "Casablanca", who's shocked, shocked to find out that there's gambling going on at Rick's, while pocketing his winnings.) Really, it's time to get rid of the bums, not just the AIG management (fire 'em all and take back the money and leave 'em broke) but the damned senators and congressmen!

A list of the films seen at New Directors/New Films: "Stay the Same, Never Change", "Barking Water", "Mukha", "Every Little Step", "La Nana", "Treeless Mountain", "Suspended" (short), "The Shaft", "La Copie de Coralie" (short), "Unmade Beds", "Killer" (short), "Ordinary Boys", "Louise-Michel", "$9.99", "The Cove", "Home", "Releve" (short), "Donne-Moi la Main", "We Live in Public".

But before i really get into New Directors, i wanted to try to write a little something about "Everlasting Moments", which is a truly remarkable film, but one that is (certainly at this time) so anomalous that it requires some explanation. And i don't think it's gotten that explanation (though it did get a lot of favorable reviews).

I'll start with this statement by Susan Sontag (from her essay "A note on novels and films"): "Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera. which is a (virtually) frozen art-form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotion. All the trappings of melodrama and high emotion may be found in the most recent and sophisticated cinema (for example, Visconti's "Senso" and "Rocco and His Brothers"), while these have been banished from most recent sophisticated novels."

I'd like to make the observation that "Everlasting Moments" is about the birth of media consciousness, of people who are learning to see themselves in terms of photography (which is a new medium when the film is set). But it is a film that is done with an almost mystical tactility, without any sense of irony, and without a trace of post-modern hyperconsciousness. It's almost like confronting a different mindset, and even in the favorable reviews there has been the condescension of dealing with the sensibility of Jan Troell, who is the mystical artisan of cinema (and one who, as much as possible, does it all: he writes or co-writes, directs, photographs and edits his films himself, and not on some little experimental scale, but on a huge epic scale, as he has done ever since "Here's Your Life" in 1966). Jan Troell is what Werner Herzog always pretends to be. (Herzog can't help it, he now always has that ironic edge, as he showed in "Encounters at the End of the World".) And it is this utterly serious approach to the premodernist sensibility (and it should be noted that all of Troell's best films have been set in the past, usually in the era of the first quarter of the 20th century: "Here's Your Life", "The Emigrants", "The New Land", "Flight of the Eagle", "Hamsun", "As White as in Snow" and now "Everlasting Moments").

I'll try to write more, and i certainly want to write about "Tokyo Sonata", but i wanted to say that this year's edition of New Directors/New Films is one of the best in many, many years.

2009-02-27T16:50:00.000-08:00

It has been a busy week. Spent three days at press screenings for the annual Rendezvous With French Cinema, saw "The Joy of Singing", "Seraphine", Costa-Gavras's "Eden Is West", Chabrol's "Bellamy", Benoit Jacquot's "Villa Amalia", Techine's "The Girl on the Train" and Daniel Thompson's "Change of Plans". For better or worse, it wasn't a bad group. Then on Thursday, saw restored films by the Kuchar Brothers at Anthology: "Lovers of Eternity", "The Thief and the Stripper", "A Woman Distressed", "Night of the Bomb" and "I Was a Teenage Rumpot". Nothing like grungy, no-budget underground films to make you feel good.

But the important thing is that there has been a cultural meltdown in the northeast. The Bernard Madoff affair hasn't even begun to have its effect, because so much of NYC cultural life is dependent on Jewish philanthropy. If there was ever a plot to destroy the art of this city, this would be perfect.

But it's not only that. There are so many shakeups and upheavals that it's dizzying. Right off the bat: the stasis about the New York State tax credit program for film and television production, which has already started to claim some productions (the Fox show "Fringe" is leaving NYC for Vancouver; it would, of course, be a Fox production, another reason to take away Rupert Murdoch's waiver from the FCC, if he can take away production, we can take away his damn licenses). California has pushed through a tax credit program: they're trying to take production back.

The Filmmakers Coop has had its offices in the Clocktower building since 2000; Alanna Heiss signed on with MoMA in 1998. Alanna was forced to retire at the end of 2008 (there is a mandatory retirement age) but in order to sweeten the deal, MoMA allowed her to retain the lease from the city on the Clocktower building. And when that happened, she looked at the Clocktower and found that she had left in space for the Coop. So (in a fit) she decided to spite MoMA by evicting the Coop (the Coop had come into the Clocktower through a deal with MoMA's Department of Film). DCA can force Alanna to keep to her original plan for the Clocktower; DCA can, in fact, take away the Clocktower from Alanna (which would be the best thing, really, just make her go away). But who knows?

The Rose Art Museum is being dismantled by Brandeis University. It's been written about by many people (including Roberta Smith in The New York Times) and i don't want to rehash it. But Brandeis, where most of the people on the board are Jewish, lost a huge amount of its endowment (rumored to have been almost 3/4 of a billion dollars) because of Bernie Madoff, and so the response was: what can we sell (fast)? And the collection at the Rose Art Museum was valued at over half a billion dollars, so....

Except that the Rose Art Museum has its own board, and it actually runs itself, basically Brandeis houses the collection and pays for utilities, all other expenses are handled by the Rose Art Museum itself. Again, who knows?

New Yorker Films closed up shop this week. Another long, complicated story. Dan Talbot actually sold New Yorker Films a number of years ago, and the new parent company has defaulted and is bankrupt and its assets are going on the auction block, and that means New Yorker Films.

What's frightening about all of this is that the fallout is happening to "innocent bystanders". In short: The Filmmakers Coop had nothing to do (really) with the bad feelings between Alanna Heiss and The Museum of Modern Art, but the Coop is getting the fallout. New Yorker Films has been operating very carefully, there really weren't many debts, but it was the company that bought out New Yorker Films that went belly-up, and New Yorker Films (and all the people that work there, like Jose Lopez) has to bear the brunt.

In term of the Rose Art Museum: Michael Rush (who has been the director for about four years) has been incredibly responsible, there have been no deficits. But he's being punished for the problems of others: he did not invest in Bernie Madoff, the Brandeis board of directors did, but their solution is just incredibly destructive.

And talking about incredibly destructive: you've got the Film Society of Lincoln Center, which last week announced that the new Executive Director, Mara Manus, has summarily fired a large part of the staff of the Film Society. Like that. And the firings included people like Sayre Maxfield, Joanna Ney, Will McCord... some of these people (like Sayre and Joanna) have been with the Film Society for decades: the Film Society was their life!

It's very upsetting to me, because so many of these people i've known for so long (let's not even get into how long i've known Jonas Mekas) and things seemed to be settling down, then there was this economic downturn, and now, so many friends and associates are being threatened.

It's not even the same as the mass firings of critics (not just film critics, but dance, theater, book critics) which started over the summer. This is just a mass detonation of so many cultural institutions, there's a scorched earth mentality going on, and so many people are just getting mowed down. It's like the Saint Valentine's Day massacre, only on an unimaginable scale. And it's not over yet!

I grew up in New York City when it was a city that was becoming the center of the art world: painting and sculpture, "happenings", dance and music, all these were just bursting. And in terms of film: there wasn't Hollywood, but there were small-scale independent films, underground films, experimental films. Though i grew up watching Hollywood movies (who didn't?) by the time i was about 10, i was aware that i had no interest in working in Hollywood, but i wanted to work in my hometown, in NYC.

And the artists! It was the end of the Abstract Expressionist era, the beginning of Pop and Minimal Art, and going to galleries, you could see new work by Barnett Newman or Mark Rothko or Agnes Martin along with new work by Donald Judd or Robert Morris or Claes Oldenburg or Red Grooms.

And now, this period is becoming historical, and people are writing histories of this period, and the kicker is, most of those people weren't even around! But nobody seems to want to ask those of us who actually were around what it was like.

And now it's all going, and fast! This is a new Depression, and this time, there might not be an Orson Welles to rise up from the WPA Federal Theater project.

I wish i could write about the movies i saw this week, but i'm too bewildered by what's happening to so many of my friends.

2009-02-18T17:47:00.000-08:00

February 18, and it's been a week since i've posted anything. I have to say that i saw what i think is a great movie yesterday: Agnes Varda's "Les Plages d'Agnes". In many ways, it's like the sequel to her "Jacquot de Nantes" only she's the subject this time. It's a film which reminds you that there are few people who can make movies with the ease and skill and finesse of Agnes Varda. She has been a master filmmaker from her earliest days, with "La Pointe Courte", and she has gotten (if anything) more fluid in her off-hand mastery. From the earliest times in her career, she has made film essays, such as "L'Opera Mouffe" and "Documenteur", and here, she ruminates on her life and her career, giving glimpses into her work, going back to places from her childhood, from various films (including time spent in L.A. during the late 1960s and 1970s).

Of course, personally, Agnes Varda can be one of the most demanding people ever, but there's a warmth and charm to this film. She and her old friend Chris Marker have reached the point where they can just pick up a camera and make a movie.

After the movie, i was talking with some friends, and they were surprised that in "Les Plages d'Agnes", Varda admits that Jacques Demy died of AIDS, and how, when they were making "Jacquot de Nantes", his illness was never discussed because of the stigma at the time.

There's been a lot that's been happening in the film world. Two weeks ago, an urgent message was sent out by the Filmmakers Coop: it seems that Alanna Heiss had given the Coop an eviction notice (the Coop moved its office and archives into the Clocktower Building in 2000). It seems that when Alanna Heiss turned over P.S. 1 to MoMA, she did not give up the lease to the Clocktower Building. Now that MoMA forced her to retire as the Director of P.S. 1, she's taking her revenge on the Coop (which was brought in by MoMA's Department of Film). It's not resolved, but the city (specifically, the Department of Cultural Affairs) is working to ensure that the Coop has a place.

At the end of last week, it was announced that Mara Manus, the new Executive Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, had just fired about a quarter of the staff. Since it was never a big staff to begin with, that's a very big deal, and many people (like Sayre Maxfield and Joanna Ney) have been with the Film Society almost from the beginning. This is a terrible situation. Mara Manus is like a nonprofit corporate raider: she goes in to a place (like the Public Theater) and gets rid of the staff, and trims the budget, and then gets out.

Well, the last big piece of film news isn't so terrible, but it signals big changes: Geoff Gilmore has left the Sundance Film Festival to join the Tribeca Film Institute. It's expected that John Cooper will take over as the director of the Sundance Film Festival (at least, i hope so, John's been there for decades at this point) and Peter Scarlett will still be running the Tribeca Film Festival per se, but Geoff Gilmore's role is to build the Tribeca "brand" as it were.

Other movies seen over the last two weeks: Wajda's "Katyn", Jan Troell's "Everlasting Moments", Ferreri's "Dillinger Is Dead". And on TV, watched some things i'd never seen before; right now, i'm watching "Bonneville" with Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates and Joan Allen. A few days ago, i finally saw "Last Summer in the Hamptons". I can't say i thought it was good, but there were fascinations, especially when someone like Viveca Lindfors was going all theatrical (which was all the time). But i still haven't been able to find a way into the Henry Jaglom aesthetic.

Today, watched the 1929 "Madame X" with Ruth Chatterton. Interesting to see.

Anyway, yesterday, on the way home, i started feeling sick, and i felt like i had twisted my ankle. Well, turned out to be gout, only this time in my right ankle. I couldn't get to Claire Denis's movie this morning. I'll go to the doctor's tomorrow (he doesn't have office hours on Wednesdays). But it's feeling better.

Now i'm watching the last part of the American Masters piece on Jerome Robbins. And there's Deborah Jowitt! And Jennifer Tipton!

2009-02-10T09:18:00.000-08:00

Blogging is one of those activities which started out as a real boon for many of us, but it's recently become a chore. This is the end of award season in the movies, and some of us have become overwhelmed with going to screenings, looking at screeners, etc. and it's hard to find a through-line to all of this cinematic viewing.

And if, like me, there's a tendency to try to think about what's on view, it makes it extremely difficult, because there's the constant shifting of focus. In the last week: John Boorman's "The Tiger's Tail", the Argentine film "The Mugger", Michael Almereyda's notebook "Paradise", Guy Debord's "The Society of the Spectacle" (was glad i went to that screening, because the only time i saw that film was when it was screened without subtitles; subtitles helped, since it's a narrated film over a miscellany of images; the beginning, with the preponderance of soft-core footage of topless young women, reminded me of the inherent sexism of so much French theory), then screeners of Chris Eigeman's "Turn the River" (i persist in thinking Famke Janssen is potentially a major actress who hasn't found the right vehicle yet), Woody Allen's "Vicky Cristina Barcelona", Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou's "Take Out", and Alex Holdridge's "In Search of a Midnight Kiss". Also: finally saw Chabrol's "La Ceremonie" as well as his "La Route de Corinth" (Netflix). Then went to a screening of Wadja's "Katyn" which i missed at the Tribeca Film Festival, but it's opening at Film Forum.

I invited Carey Lovelace to the screening of the Guy Debord, and was glad i did, because it's the kind of intellectualized work that needs to be talked about and discussed with friends afterwards. It's the talking afterwards that completes "The Society of the Spectacle" as a theatrical experience. It's also a little more rhythmically organized and (because of the inclusion of certain film clips, etc.) more dramatic than other Debord films that i've seen.

Well, now onto today's screenings: Ferreri's "Dillinger Is Dead", which i saw in 1970, but not since, and wonder how it will seem....