A portrait I took of Jonas Mekas last March. A toast to cinema!
This makes me so happy that I had to share it right away: Jonas Mekas has a new website: http://jonasmekasfilms.com/
The introduction alone left me grinning from ear to ear.
The video section is an incredible treasure trove, and an important archive in its own right. The list of those featured reads like a who’s who of the avant-garde: Carl Gustav Jung, Salvador Dali, the Velvet Underground, Frank O’Hara, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, George Maciunas, Patti Smith, Nam June Paik, Robert Frank, Philip Glass, Carl Dreyer, Ken Jacobs, Stevie Wonder, Jackie Onassis (!), Timothy Leary, Stan Brakhage and more.
There’s also a section of Jonas’s poetry, in Lithuanian and in English. People often forget that Jonas is also a poet, but after reading some of his work it’s clear that poetry is essential part of his DNA as an artist.
But what I love most about this website is that you get a sense of Jonas’s approach to art and life, which is joyful and boisterous and spontaneous and sensual and rife with childlike wonder. Never infected by a deadening professionalism, he looks at the world generously (and hard) and is able to communicate the fragile beauty that is cinema (and life) to those willing to see it. Whenever I see a film by Jonas, I am always struck with the desire to drink up that beauty with my entire being.
Jonas’s new website was designed by Andy Doro, who aside from being a good friend, also helped me with the coding for this website. Congrats Andy! I raise my glass of Švyturys to you.
Kathryn Bigelow: Will she achieve mythic status as the first woman to win Best Director?
So I can’t resist chiming in with my favorites, even though the nominees are exceptionally uninspired this year. As the Academy repeatedly demonstrates, committees, commercialism and eclectic choices don’t mix. Keep in mind that my ‘’should wins” are culled from the nominations, and not my art film fantasies of who deserves to have been shortlisted (two words: Claire Denis).
Oh and for all of you Smartphone users: there’s a very fun Oscar App that you should download if you like to call the horse race in advance, and weigh your picks against the hoi polloi. It is also necessary to imbibe something to get through the ceremony, especially the insipid “best song” category. (Please don’t drink the Pandora punch; it looks revolting.)
Best Picture
Should win: The Hurt Locker
Will win: Avatar
Best Director
Should win: Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker
Will win: Kathryn Bigelow
Best Actor
Should win: Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart
Will win: George Clooney, Up in the Air
Best Supporting Actor
Should win: Stanley Tucci, The Lovely Bones (His performance is the only thing that makes this movie bearable.)
Will win: Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds
Best Actress
Should win: Carey Mulligan, An Education
Will win: Carey Mulligan
Carey Mulligan from An Education and Mo’Nique from Precious.
Best Supporting Actress
Should win: Mo’Nique, Precious: I Refuse to Write the Entire Title Because it is Pretentious and Unecessary
Will win: Mo’Nique
Best Animated Film
Should win: I’m impossibly torn between Coraline & Fantastic Mr. Fox
Will win: Up
Best Foreign Language Film
Should win: The White Ribbon (Désolée, M. Audiard)
art + video
It’s Armory Week, and the number of openings, events and parties in the next few days makes my head spin. Aside from the usual mainstays, the new kid on the block this year is the Independent. Born out the ashes of X-initiative, it offers an alternative to the inescapable shopping mall ambiance of the art fair — there’s even a panel on gluttony! And a film program too. Check it out here.
Scope also has a video program, with work by Martha Colburn, George Kuchar and fashion-y films. Sashay!
fashion
Look who’s copying a page from the Vezzoli playbook: Agyness Deyn deigns to appear in a McDermott and McGough film.
film reviews
Andrew Grant (nom de blog: filmbrain) reviews The Ghost Writer, and thinks it’s pretty good.
You should see it, especially since all proceeds from the film go to the Roman Polanski legal defense fund. (Kidding!)
mystery flavor
My favorite posthuman Andrei Codrescu is anti-Avatar, and pro-zombie. Deliciously brainy as always.
My friend Ziyan and I as zombie-vampire hybrids. Kristen Stewart, eat your heart out.
new york
Movie program ephemera from the 8th street Playhouse, which I remember going to as a little girl. Thanks to reader Jack for the tip.
photography Andy Warhol: Unexposed Exposures just opened at Steven Kashar.
If the Factory had had a facebook page, these would be the pictures that they would post to their wall. Lots o’ pics online too.
watch online
The first and only truly Beat film Pull My Daisy (Frank and Leslie, 1959) is on Google Video.
Nollywood, Nigeria’s grassroots independent film industry, produces over 2,000 feature-length movies per year. This makes it the third* largest in the world, behind Bollywood and the United States in terms of the number of movies made, with profits ringing in at around $250 million dollars. Working with digital cameras and near-zero budgets, these films are a rare instance of autonomous film production in a third world country, and are wildly popular throughout West Africa.
Pieter Hugo’s striking photographs reveal, in a highly stylized form, the characters and subject matter of Nollywood cinema. Horror dominates as characteristically low-budget genre that appeals to audiences and filmmakers alike, and there are a profusion of stories about zombies, black magic and the occult as a result. But there are also stories about poverty, teenage pregnancy, tribal conflicts, HIV/AIDS and other contemporary realities that haunt daily life.
Not surprisingly, Hugo’s work is controversial, and he has been accused of sensationalism and spreading racial stereotypes (for these photos as well as for an earlier series, The Hyena & Other Men). But I think the sheer force of his images combined with the artifice-upon-artifice presentation make these photographs more performative than anything else. They actively seek to disturb the viewer — much like the films themselves.
And how do you get your hands on some Nollywood films? Format-wise, the films are mostly distributed on VCDs, making them hard to view in the United States. I have asked friends (and a few cab drivers) to recommend some popular titles, but it seems like there isn’t any equivalent (as of yet) to a Nollywood Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, the universally beloved Bollywood classic. You can watch full-length films at this website, but I was enraged by excessive pop-ups. The best solution for New Yorkers? Go to Harlem, find a vendor, and ask what his favorites are. Festival fare it isn’t, but for those truly interested in developments in world cinema — whatever that may be — the Nollywood film industry is too revolutionary to ignore.
*Some estimates actually place the Nollywood film industry ahead of the U.S.
Pieter Hugo’s photographs are on view at Yossi Milo Gallery until April 10. There is also a photobook available via Amazon — the reviews give you an idea of just how polarizing these photos are.
“Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” – Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
“It was about time that Fuck the police! replaced Yes sir, officer! In this sense, the open hostility of certain gangs only expresses, in a slightly less muffled way, the poisonous atmosphere, the desire for salvational destruction by which the country is consumed.” -The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection
Un Prophète has the rare distinction of having been in the right place at the right time. When droves of cinephiles line up to see it when it opens this Friday, they will unfortunately be rather late to the party, for its impact was felt in France last year (and indeed, all the important European film societies showered it with awards quite some ago). If it wins the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, that will only add a shiny American feather to its amply decorated hat, and maybe Audiard will make a film in the U.S. as a result.
Newcomer Tahar Rahim as Malik El Djebana
But what makes this film a cause célèbre in France has nothing to do with the quality of the film itself, although the film will undoubtedly become a classic — it has French Goodfellas written all over it. Un Prophète is important the same way Entre Les Murs [The Class, 2008] was important, because it touches on the changing racial and class dynamics that have been the subject of heated controversy lately, particularly since the appointment of conservative Éric Besson as Minister of Immigration, and his accompanying xenophobic agenda: he is anti-Burka, pro-immigration quotas and re-patriations and thinks that immigrants should have to pass a French language test. (Oh, and schoolchildren should sing La Marseillaise at least once a year.) His policies have led him to be deemed “the most hated man in France” (more hated than Sarko?) and things have only gotten worse since Besson was discovered, in true repressed-politician fashion, to have a secret Muslim girlfriend.
Malik and Corsican mob leader César Luciani [Niels Arestrup]
So what does this have to do with Un Prophète? The film is the coming-of-age story of a young Arab delinquent Malik, who learns to survive in prison by successfully wheeling and dealing with members of the Corsican and Arab gangs that are engaged in a brutal turf war. The socio-political commentary is indirect but it’s pretty damn clear: if the prison is a microcosm of society, the open hostility between the two clans mirrors “in a slightly less muffled way” the conflict between ethnic groups and their struggle for domination. The Corsican gang in particular is threatened by the influx of Arab prisoners; the sheer number makes it hard for them to maintain control. Malik is an interesting figure to put at the center of all of this: ethnically ambiguous, he is forced to kill a fellow Arab at the bidding of a Corsican mafia boss [played wonderfully by Niels Arestrup]. That man comes back to haunt him and suffuses the film with a vaguely preternatural / quasi-religious aura (as do the biblically-inflected chapters and the title of the film itself). Un Prophète has started a national conversation about prison reform, and that’s momentous and necessary, especially when Sarkozy himself refers to the institution as “the nation’s shame.” But what Un Prophète really dramatizes, through its parable of an Arab outsider becoming the ultimate insider, is the ascendency of a new polyglot, multi-racial national identity.
The ghost of Reyeb [Hichem Yacoubi]. This strangely reminded me of the ghost who haunts Gena Rowland’s character in Opening Night.
Titles with Biblical references are interspersed throughout the film.
U.S. viewers are likely to only get a sense of the political overtones, as Un Prophète is also a genre piece that also calls to mind recent gangster films such as Gomorrah, Canet’s Ne Le Dis à Personne, and the two-part Mesrine. But Un Prophète also deserves to be included in that slippery category of “zeitgeist” films, because it takes on a flammable topic, however obliquely, and acutely presages circumstances to come.
“If we go beyond a few rudimentary signs (eccentricity, classicism, dandyism, sport, ceremony) can clothing signify without recourse to the speech that describes it, comments upon it, and provides it with signifiers and signifieds abundant enough to constitute a system of meaning?” -Roland Barthes, The Fashion System
Some fashion designers create clothing and some create universes. Alexander McQueen did the latter, and he often drew directly from cinema for inspiration. Citing influences such as Hitchcock and Kubrick, his fashion shows were elaborately produced spectacles that often evoked scenes from classic movies. Fantasy, horror, noir, Merchant-Ivory costume drama — all the elements of real showmanship were there. It was also impossible to reduce a McQueen collection to the usual trendspotty rhetoric, i.e. “brown is the new black” or “pencil skirts are back,” or “another season of dominatrix heels.” His clothing wasn’t about innovations in materials, new silhouettes, or outright sex appeal, although those factors couldn’t help but figure in. McQueen was for the girl who wakes up feeling equal parts Siouxsie Sioux and Anne Bancroft, who wears David Bowie eyepaint with an Audrey Hepburn shift dress to a party*, who cultivates the queasily erotic aura of a Manson girl, who chips her own nail polish and rips her own fishnets because she doesn’t want to look too “done” but puts her hair up into a chignon because, well, she can. A lot of designers mine movies for their source material, but few were as inventive and eclectic as McQueen.
*this is my current sartorial fantasy
McQueen Fall 2005. Inspired by Hitchcock brunettes-turned-blonde. (Now I want canary yellow shoes.)
McQueen Spring 2007. Inspired by Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.
McQueen Spring / Summer 2004. A re-enactment of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? This is truly breathtaking.
Steve McQueen’s Hunger comes out on DVD today from Criterion, and I can’t think of an art-house title from the past year that is more deserving of the “Criterion” treatment (including what must surely be a harrowing Blu-ray release). A video artist turned feature filmmaker, McQueen refuses to talk about his work in convenient, journalist-friendly soundbytes, or define what it’s about for the viewer. In an interview, he cites a conversation between Pauline Kael and Jean-Luc Godard as a source of inspiration for Hunger:
“I found this interview that Godard did with Pauline Kael two days after Bobby Sands died, where Godard essentially said, “The reason why Bobby Sands is important is because he’s childish.” I got this image in my head of this child sitting at the table with some food, and the parents saying, ‘You’re not leaving this table until you finish eating it.’ The kid says no, wrongly or rightly. What time a child goes to bed, or the clothes a child wears, those things are dictated to by experience, and it’s a common situation that the only power a kid has is to refrain from eating. It’s a situation all of us know.”
I love that how that one word “childish” spurs an image that allows McQueen to take a specific historical moment — the hunger strike of Bobby Sands — and translate it into a common experience. Here’s what Godard said in the actual interview (Pauline Kael is asking him about film being used a a political weapon):
JLG: …I think a good example is La Chinoise…It was made in 1967 before the 1968 events in France, before the Weatherman here, before the Baader-Meinof in Germany, or the Red Brigade in Italy. At the time it was hated by the left, who said, “These people are ridiculous.” And today, after seeing it fifteen years later, we discover that all of those people, even Bobby Sands a few days ago, are childish, and it’s because they are childish that they are important people.
“Childish” here isn’t used as pejorative — Godard seems to be using it as an adjective to encapsulate a strength of conviction, an uncompromising will, and a sense of stubborn refusal. In La Chinoise, there is a pivotal scene in which the university student Veronique has a conversation with Francis Jeanson, a leftist professor. He repeatedly questions her morals, her anger, and what he considers to be her childish revolutionary actions.
It is evident that the second part of Hunger, in which Bobby Sands confronts a priest who tries to dissuade him from becoming a martyr, is directly inspired by this train conversation. Like La Chinoise, they argue in a very long take, almost in silhouette, forcing the viewer to focus on the dialogue.
Other McQueen news: I recently dropped by his show at Marian Goodman, and despite having missed Yoko Ono by mere moments, I was a bit underwhelmed by Giardini (his film from the Venice Biennale). There is a lovely piece called Static in which McQueen circles the the Statue of Liberty from a helicopter, that transforms the tourist trap back into an object of awe and wonder. It’s a must-see for video art enthusiasts and McQueen completists.
His next project? A biopic about the Nigerian singer Fela Kuti, which will hopefully sidestep the clichés of the genre and will undoubtedly be visually and sonically arresting.
Dennis Lim’s review of Hunger in The New York Times
A nice breakdown of important moments in McQueen’s career from New York Magazine
In Pedro Almodóvar’s latest mise-en-abîme of a film, the protagonist is a director who makes a movie called Chicas y Maletas (Girls and Suitcases). This film is a tongue-in-cheek remake of the movie that put Almodóvar on the map, Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, 1988]. The plot of the latter anything but simple, but the film revolves around Pepa (played by Carmen Maura) who frantically looks for her former lover Ivan in order to give him a suitcase full of his things and to tell him some very important news. The suitcase is a textbook MacGuffin –and it’s worth noting that in Hitchcock’s original explanation, the MacGuffin is literally a piece of baggage — while also symbolizing the emotional baggage of a past relationship, which Pepa must eventually ditch in order to free herself from him. (She ends up throwing the suitcase in a dumpster.)
Carmen Maura as Pepa: on the verge of a nervous breakdown. (Don’t mind the French subtitles.)
In Broken Embraces, Penelope Cruz takes on the Pepa role in the film-within-a-film, with one crucial difference: she’s on crutches. The crutches are not a prop: In the principal plot of Broken Embraces, her husband pushes her down the stairs when she tries to leave him for the director. She is both emotionally and physically crippled by him, but goes on to finish the film despite her disability. The interesting thing about this is that the Spanish word for “crutches” is muletas, which is almost identical to maletas (suitcases). The meaning of the play on words is clear: Her former lover is a crutch that she too must cast aside in order to move on.
Penelope Cruz as Lena, wearing red and leaving with a suitcase of her own.
Carmen Machi as Chon, visiting Lena. [What a fat big toe!"] Lena’s crutches are in the background. (P.S. I love her dress.)
Another layer: the director of the film (Mateo Blanco, who changes his name to Harry Caine) is also impaired: he becomes blind in the car accident in which he loses his lover (Cruz as Lena). Fourteen years later, he re-edits Chicas y Maletas in order to repair himself and move on. Almodóvar, when speaking about this character, mentioned that he recently had been afflicted with crushing migraines and wondered what it would be like to make a film as a blind man. The underlying message of this film, in which life and cinema are fully intertwined? We must live and love despite all handicaps (emotional, physical and everything in between). The last line: “Films must be finished, even in the dark.” This is a fitting metaphor for the creative process as well.
Lluís Homar as the blind Harry Caine: His lack of vision is momentarily overcome by touch as he caresses the screen.
Don’t delay! Entries must be postmarked by February 24th, 2010.
In the future, I would love for this blog to become a place to find out about eclectic happenings all around the city, a sort of cinematic bulletin board for the events that won’t necessarily make their way into Time Out New York. So this is also a request of you, my dear readers (all three of you): what do you know about that’s off the beaten path, that’s cool (but not too cool) and most importantly, that no one else has on their radar? Send it my way, s’il vous plaît, and I’ll probably post it here.
Miroslav Tichý’s photos are a mess, and I mean that as a compliment. They look like they have been stepped on, scratched, crumpled up, and left out in the rain. Old and neglected, many of them have partially oxidized, obscuring the ghostly image that lies beneath a layer of corrosion. They are covered with fingerprints, grit, and in one case, the image of stray fly that made its way on to the enlarger. They are small and oddly-shaped, with nary a straight-edge in sight. Seemingly artless, they look like mistakes that another photographer would consign to the dustbin. But for Tichý, the imperfections are where the beauty resides: “The flaws are part of it,” he insists. “That’s the poetry.”
(Click on individual photos to enlarge)
Tichý himself is an odd character: a toothless Czech vagabond, he was briefly jailed by the Communists for being deemed “subversive.” While he did wander around snapping photos of the unsuspecting in his native Kyjov, most of the village saw him for what he was: a harmless eccentric. Using cameras that he constructed from found materials (clothespins, spools, cardboard tubes, string), Tichý shot about two rolls of film per day, mostly of females caught unaware in the midst of their day-to-day leisure activities (sunbathing, reading, riding bikes, sitting on park benches.) While there is undeniably an element of voyeurism to his work, his photos remind of Chris Marker’s atmospheric portraits of women or Gerhard Richter’s blurry photo-paintings — hazy, feverish, sensuous images suffused with an undercurrent of death, decay and dissolution.
Tichý’s work is currently on display at ICP, and it is something you should truly see in person. Incidentally, there is also an exhibit of Surrealist photography from Paris and a small presentation of vintage prints by Eugène Atget (which Walter Benjamin described as resembling “the scene of the crime”). Do you need any more beautiful reasons to go? Allez-y à ICP!
