THE CYNEPHILE

Let’s get down to brass tacks: there are few things I love more than hardboiled film noir dialogue—that outrageous, rapid-fire back-and-forth smothered in pulp and peppered with slang. It’s a major source of the genre’s appeal, cloaking the film in the seedy, coded vernacular of the underworld. The tough talk in The Sweet Smell of Success represents a particular apogee of the form, and the neurotically articulate screenplay is chock-full of colorful metaphors, New York argot, and punchy one-liners. Some of the most memorable: “You’re a cookie full of arsenic,” “Just don’t leave me in a minor key,” ‘Your dead son, get yourself buried,” and “The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.”

Which brings us to Christpher Wool. This fine example of Wool’s language-based painting is now on view at MoMA as part of their current refresh of the Contemporary Galleries, and its visual impact is akin to that of a New York Post headline: graphic, sensational, and not overly predisposed to sublety. Wool appropriates this evocative line from the film, shortens it like a text message, and then stencils it imperfectly in pump-em-full-of-lead-black on a stark white background. “CATS INBAG BAGS IN RIVER suddenly morphs into a puckish haiku, a expression of hardnosed lyricism. Sidney Falco, the character who utters this juicy bit of repartee in the film, is someone that we come to admire for his gumption in doing away with the competition, and his cockiness has a comic edge. This painting too, manifests a certain biting humor, a humor that mocks the seriousness of painting and pays tribute to all of the sinister smart guys in the room—of which Christopher Wool is one.

Here’s Mr. Falco himself, aka Tony Curtis, delivering the line full of piss, vinegar and snarling ambition. Don’t be a two-time loser: see this classic if you haven’t already, and then check out this painting in person.

Baby you can drive my car: Ryan Gosling in Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive

Now that 2011 has faded from memory like Ryan Gosling driving off into the sunset, the film-critical has assessed the annual cinematic bounty via elaborate list-making rituals. Criteria are established, “Passiondexes” are instituted, antes are upped, insults are lobbed, and enemies are forged over the smallest of differences. Then, after all that excitement comes the coup de grâce: the frantic bacchanal known as awards season.

But as we all know, imposing hierarchies and trophies on art is a mug’s game. Making the game all the more pointless this year was a bumper crop of truly great cinema from all over the world, along with some revolutionary documentaries. If 2011 was a banner year for anything, it would be the 3D documentary, which in the hands of filmmakers like Werner Herzog (Cave of Forgotten Dreams) and Wim Wenders (Pina) became something ecstatic and exultant, creating an in-the-round cinematic experience that was both sculptural and phantasmal, real and imagined. As Méliès and Feuillade and even André Bazin knew, the film image is at heart the province of ghosts, the 3D image has the salutary effect of making those ghosts all the more real. I loved that these two documentaries paradoxically insisted on cinema’s otherworldly, spirit-laden existence.

Other noteworthy events in cinephillia: New York got another theater, Lars von Trier made a film that wasn’t completely misogynistic, and Terrence Malick came back from the dead with Tree of Life. The latter was perhaps the most anticipated film of the year for cinephiles, and though I respect the breadth of its ambition, I’m not quite sure I appreciate the film as a totality—or its philosophical, cosmological and/or religious underpinnings. But I can appreciate its vivifying details and gestures, and the extremely inventive editing which made the shots feel fluid and connected, in a way that was evocative of memory. It is, I think, a film for those who cherish the grace note over the whole.

The great whatsit that begins and ends Tree of Life.

Here are my awards, bestowed upon idiosyncratic films that sing, surprise, shock, and appeal to me for weird and fluttery and unknown reasons. Please nominate your own in the comments.

Most deserved/belated theatrical run:
Edward Yang’s masterpiece A Brighter Summer Day gets its due at Walter Reade.

Best documentary with depth:
Pina in 3D wins by a hair over Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Both are must-sees.

Best slow cinema:
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s lush, astounding long shots in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives create a cinematic experience that feels like a fever dream.

Best fast cinema:
Drive has it all: white-knuckle car chases, bloodsoaked shoot-em-ups, and bone-crunching violence, all stylized to perfection and set to an electro-pop beat.
Runner-up: Senna, a profile of the Formula One driver that races around so many twists and turns, it practically induces motion sickness.

Best performance by livestock:
The goat that stands on the table in Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte.

Best portrait of a life well lived:
Bill Cunningham New York imbued me with tremendous respect for a true artist and a gentlemen from another time.

Best subversive use of state propaganda:
The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu brilliantly remixes state footage to reveal the truth that its authors wanted to conceal.

Most gorgeously-realized apocalyptic vision:
I have to hand it to Lars von Trier: Melancholia is the cinematic equivalent of a Romantic painting.

Best crowd pleaser that is too cute for words:
The Artist

Best New York film:
Margaret

Other films worth seeking out, in no particular order:
Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry, A Separation, Attenberg, Tomboy, Sleeping Sickness, Weekend, Certified Copy, Martha Marcy May Marlene, The Skin I Live In, The Future, Of Gods and Men, Nostalgia For the Light, To Die Like A Man, Another Earth, A Screaming Man, Viva Riva!, and Christian Marclay’s 24-hour mashup, The Clock.

Death, from Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, makes a cameo.

Ming Wong’s Persona Performa at the Museum of the Moving Image was one of the highlights of 2011 for me, in part because it synthesized the genres I’m most passionate about: cinema, art, and live performance. Ming Wong, a multimedia artist whose name deserves to be better known in the art and film worlds, created a fluid experience that morphed from a museum-installation to a theater piece to a dance sequence, to culminate in a screening-cum-performance. These different segments bled into one another quite seamlessly, emphasizing the protean nature of live performance as the audience moved throughout various spaces in the museum.

The catalyst for Wong’s piece—or perhaps the navel—is Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, one of director’s most austerely experimental works and the film that Susan Sontag deemed his masterpiece. Persona is centered on the relationship between two women: an actress who has suffered a nervous breakdown (Liv Ullmann) and the nurse who is assigned to take care of her (Bibi Andersson). The film is most renowned for an iconic sequence in which the same conversation is shown from both characters’ perspectives. The final scene will make you gasp.

Wong’s piece fleshes out the central motifs of the film, that of communication and doubling. Actors and actresses in blond wigs performed continuous configurations, deconstructions and reconfigurations of the film’s gestures, pairing up at the finale to mimic moments from the film in different languages with their images projected on the screen behind them. The performers were a diverse group of women and men, reflecting the diversity of the surrounding neighborhood, Astoria (which a narrator refers to cheekily as “Actoria”), and adding a layer of variation and defamiliarization. Here’s glimpse of what the performance looked like, but please don’t mistake the copy for the real thing—the actual event was immersive in a way that a YouTube video can never be.

Ming Wong’s practice reminds me a bit of Yasumasa Morimura, the Japanese visual artist who alters famous paintings to include his own image. For his video installations, Wong often impersonates characters from the movies—enacting his cine-obsessions as well as subverting expectations of gender and race. Wong (who is from Singapore originally but resides in Berlin) has drawn inspiration from auteurs such as Wong Kar-Wai, Fassbinder, Pasolini, Visconti, and Sirk, as well as exploring classic cinema from Singapore and Malaysia. Almost all of his pieces deal with language barriers, in juxtaposition to the obstensible universality of film-image. Though originally he was both the director and star of his films, his recent productions have become larger in scope, with several cast members, more elaborate sets and costumes, and numerous locations. For his next project, I’d love to see him take on a film that explicitly engages in multilingual wordplay (Godard, anyone?) collaborate with a well-known auteur (maybe that master of genre satire Tsai Ming-Liang) or re-construct an epic film—his artistic capacity to speak through the medium of cinema comes through loud and clear.

Persona Performa Panorama is on view at the Museum of the Moving Image until April 1.

In addition, many of Ming Wong’s pieces can be previewed on his website.