Christian Marclay's The Clock

I stood in line the next to last day that Christian Marclay's The Clock was screening at Lincoln Center, and I really lucked out. The line was only 2 and half hours. My friend from Georgia was suitably impressed by the lengths New Yorkers will go to for an experiential art film.

The film consists of thousands of spliced clips from cinema, put together so that each minute is filled with references to that minute, with clocks and watches, which is then played on that minute of the day, in a 24-hour cycle. The clips were largely English and French films, old black and white, last year's blockbusters, and some b-cinema with a few Asian or Swedish film clips thrown in.

Remarkably, what ought to have been a disjointed, jarring experience by the very nature of it proceeded with some degree of flow and linearity, largely owing to the great sounds transitions, which were carefully managed. This makes sense; the person ahead of me in line shared some of the artist's early sound work in the 80s. He spliced mechanically rather than digitally then.



I saw 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm, always hyperaware of the time. The clips made me wonder "Is this what people do a 6:30? Miss trains? And do they eat soup at 8 o'clock? Is this life?" I enjoyed recognizing the clips. Immediately one knows so much even in never-before-seen clips--who the protagonist is, roughly when it was filmed, the mood of the piece. It's remarkable and would create a magnifiscent time capsule for someone to discover in 1,000 years, so much of our common consciousness is bound up in it.

I enjoyed, or rather disenjoyed, the continual interruption of the narrative, which would begin to drag you in only to end. It harasses the viewer with his status as a viewer, never letting him forget what and where he is. Or, of course, when it is.



And naturally everything you can think to say about the nature or passage of time is relevant to this piece which makes you hyperaware of the passage of time as you live it.

Also, see twitter for a variety of bad or better puns and jokes on the meta-ness of having to wait for hours to see this film.

Meat Love

Czech artist Jan Svankmajer created this stop-motion piece in 1989.

Holiday Movie Rec: The Maiden Heist

It is still the holidays, right? Well, if you are scrounging around for something to do with all your free time before the New Year begins, may I suggest:

Art + Crime + Christopher Walken doing comedy=
The Maiden Heist.

Obviously, I quite like the elements both separately and together. It's a fairly good film, certainly passable holiday entertainment, but you probably won't hear about it because the financing company had a bit of a hiccup and poof went the money for promotion.

The Maiden Heist stars Morgan Freeman, Christopher Walken, William H. Macy, and Marcia Gay Harden in a comedy centered on three museum security guards who devise a plan to steal back their favorite artworks before they are transferred to another museum. It's a labor of love, and the characters get into all the trouble you might expect and then some. It's really worth it just to see Christopher Walken in a snorkel mask at the end. Just a thought if you don't know what to do with yourselves over the break.

Something Weird This Way Comes

Ah, love that title. It's from my new article on the Tim Burton at MoMA exhibition up on Blogcritics. To wit:

It certainly must feel strange for an isolated kid from the suburbs of California to have hundreds of his drawings and objects ensconced in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. No less so because he is known for his films rather than his drawings. Yet if the opening crowds are anything to judge by, most museum-goers are nothing but thrilled to see this exhaustive exhibition of 700+ works related to Tim Burton's career. The crowds are right, for the same aesthetic binds Burton's early work to his later films.

Face the crowds you must, if you want to wander through the strange byproducts of Burton's imaginative mind. MoMA created a great entrance: through the mouth of a monster you enter a black and white striped hall lined with TVs playing a series of Stainboy animations. Then you enter a dark room where a carousel turns to creepy carnival music and glow-in-the-dark paintings on black velvet stare out at you. Next you enter the well-lit, white-walled galleries of MoMA – but even here things don't return to normalcy. The walls are filled with hundreds of sketches of monsters and people on everything from canvas to cocktail napkins.

Rest here.

And a happy weird Tuesday to you all.




h

Keats and Autumn

I saw Bright Star yesterday, a very romantic film about Romantic poet John Keats. Liberties may have been taken with the poet's love life, but the quiet, well shot movie is a beautiful period piece nonethless. Ben Wihshaw certainly looks the part of the 25 year old Romantic poet dying of consumption. There are some gorgeous shots of the English countryside. However the chief virtue of Bright Star must be the way it slowly takes you through some of Keat's verse.

It skipped the poem that I hoped to hear; his Ode to Autumn being very perfect for this time of year.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers;
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing, and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

j

Easy Virtue's Silent Incarnation, Plus Captions!

"Here you are, a beautiful young woman immersed in scandal, about to be divorced. I could find you guilty, or you could come home with me."

Easy Virtue Stats:
Noel Coward writes play 1925
Alfred Hitchcock makes silent film in 1928
Idiots make bad film in 2008

The glib charm of Noel Coward's social comedy must come through better on stage, since the 2008 film blew it. The latest film version with Kristin Scott Thomas, Colin Firth, and Jessica Biel had a chance at capturing that charm, but something went wrong. Alfred Hitchcock 1928 film does them one better. Hitchcock's silent film obviously loses the clever dialogue and, instead of a comedy, the film becomes a sentimental melodrama, albeit with a rather emancipated heroine. Yet the framing of the story in a courthouse, the transitions, the theatrical acting and the mooody orchestra pieces all make for a fun watch.

The film might be hard to find, but amazingly there is a website that has 1,000 film stills telling the story scene by scene. I started to wonder halfway through if silent films weren't a perfect opportunity for audience creativity. Like Mystery Science Theater, you could create the words to the movie...


"No, really darling, I only take gin in my teacup."


"Golly--I'm smoking a cigarette. A flagrant sign you're stuffy mother will hate me!"


"Darling--why is your father still holding my hand---I've gotten into scandals over such things."


"How charming. But if you don't get me out of here, I insist on a second divorce."


"If only I could read."


"Wait a sec--she looks familiar!"


"There goes the family reputation. I should have listened to Mother."


"Migraine my ass! I'll dance in my slutty satin gown if I please."


"It's true I shouldn't dance with my husband's friend. But then, virtue is never easy."

A Lone Bad Review of Summer Hours

Summer Hours, a French film with Juliette Binoche, just opened in New York city and made a bit of a stir on some art blogs for wrapping a Corot in bubble wrap. The synopsis sounded charming, and I did the unthinkable a watched two films in a week, this time after paying $12.50 (!) for a ticket.

$12.50 did not quite buy me the charming, artsy French film I was expecting. The idea is that three siblings are left to divvy up the inheritance of a house and art collection upon their mother's passing. The film built up well but it didn't resolve at all--when the credits came on, I was surprised and most unsatisfied. Whatever happened to good old build up-conflict-resolution cycles? Aside from the beginning of the film before the mother dies, and the character of the housekeeper throughout, I felt like the story telling became an unravelling of separate pieces of thread with no end. So the director abruptly cuts the thread.


I've checked. I'm the only person on the Internet who left nonplussed. This film got a rave review in the NY Times and most everywhere else, has the lovely Juliet Binoche, and was sponsored by the Musee D'Orsay who let it use some of its works of art. (In return for funding the film, the Musee only asked to be included in the film in some way, which is an interesting concept.)

So maybe you shouldn't take my word for it. The treatment of the adult children and the decisions left to them is matter of fact and unsentimental, and the wisteria is indeed lovely. That's worth something.

Preference for Fictional Fiction

In the absence of my boyfriend and thus a live-in excuse to procrastinate, I took fate and a glass of wine in my own hands and decided to watch a movie last night. We don't have a TV and the boyfriend downloads any movies we watch, so to secure and watch a film is a feat for me.

Watching The Queen with Helen Mirren made me feel a little as if I were peering with binoculars into the palace windows. The film used the royal handling of Diana's death as its plot; I felt like a I was reading an imaginative, physchoanalytic tabloid. (Is the news footage of Diana's mourers real? I think I remember hearing it was.) It was a well-done film, but it shares much the same problems as the novella The Uncommon Reader, also based on Queen Elizabeth. It's a weird mix of real and immagined. The Queen is even more factious than the novella, if only because the novella's plot was imagined and the film's was real. I prefer my fiction more fictional, and my biographies factual. It's handled as if a conflation of art and life would take on a greater degree of realism, but it comes across as celebrity speculation.

I quite like it when Lord Byron or Oscar Wilde conflates art and life to dramatize themselves; it just feels different here. Is it a function of the Queen Elizabeth's reticence that people like to imagine her private inner life or does her position as Queen transform her into a public figurehead at the service of the arts?

Curious Cases

" 'He seems to grow younger every year,' they would remark. And if old Roger Button, now sixty-five years old, had failed at first to give a proper welcome to his son he atoned at last by bestowing on him what amounted to adulation.

And here we come to an unpleasant subject which it will be well to pass over as quickly as possible. There was only one thing that worried Benjamin Button; his wife had ceased to attract him. At that time Hildegarde was a woman of thirty-five, with a son, Roscoe, fourteen years old. In the early days of their marriage Benjamin had worshipped her. But, as the years passed, her honey-coloured hair became an unexciting brown, the blue enamel of her eyes assumed the aspect of cheap crockery-moreover, and, most of all, she had become too settled in her ways, too placid, too content, too anaemic in her excitements, and too sober in her taste. As a bride it been she who had "dragged" Benjamin to dances and dinners--now conditions were reversed."

F. Scott Fitzgerald is, as a rule, charming, and the short story from which this excerpt is taken is only a slight exception. There's something intriguing and yet tedious about following a character whose life runs backward both in story and new movie. Perhaps it's because of the inevitability of the premise?

The movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is based off of Fitzgerald's 1921 short story that follows Benjamin through his life from birth as an old man as he lives, falls in love, and dies as a child. The movie differs in mostly every other respect. The acting of Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett is, of course, accomplshed, and the aging process is a testament to the marvels of technological advancement. It was well made, but nearly 3 hours with no plot development is slow going.The short story is worthwhile; it's up to you to decide if the movie is worth 3 hours of your time. An hour and a half, certainly. For 3 hours, I require action.

It's a great premise for a story, and a great fantasy to play in your head, but it doesn't make for intriguing cinema. What is the crux of the plot? Benjamin grows young. And what happens? Benjamin grows young. There is no great struggle, just the unnatural process of unaging.

Both short story and movie are curious cases in themselves. A great premise for both, and on one hand a great writer, and the other excellent actors. Yet they fall short, at least in my estimation. We will see if the film becomes curiously popular. Stranger things have happened.

Coco Chanel and Edith Piaf: French Icons with Panache

Beware the women of Paris. They will chew you like a baguette, and down you with a sip of wine.




Formed by a hard childhood in poverty and wartime France, these two self-made women Coco Chanel, legendary house founder of Chanel, and Edith Piaf, "the little songbird" (at 4 feet 10 inches) exercised a severe dedication to their arts that led to international success and renown. Despite personal problems and society's moral approbation, the designer and the singer fashioned themselves into the top people in their profession, in a style that was wholly their own.

I watched La Vie En Rose last night, a 2007 movie telling the tempestuous life of French singer Edith Piaf starring the excellent Marion Cotillard. The movie switches poetically between scenes of her childhood and her early death from liver cancer at 48 years of age, and I recommend seeing it. Born in 1915 to a mother who sang on the streets and later deserted her and a circus performer father who left her in a brothel where prostitutes cared for her until he took her to sing on the streets at 14, Edith had small prospects and no education. A club owner recognized the talent in the starving street urchin at age 20, and her fortunes begin to change. Along with success came tragic love affairs and morphine and alcohol addiction. The movie paints her as the 'artiste' throwing temper tantrums, and she retains a coarseness throughout her life. Edith was not always a pleasant person, but then neither was Coco when something blocked her shrewd plans (albeit Coco exhibited great self-control).

Perhaps this temperamental street brat doesn't seem similar to Coco Chanel, educated in a convent and now the epitome of elegance? Yet the two aren't linked merely by coming into the height of their power around the WWII, worldwide success and a close identification with that French je ne sais quoi.

As women, they overcame the social stigma of their origins, had affairs with rich and successful men and were left brokenhearted, and surpassed who they were as individuals by creating something bigger than themselves, seen today in their fascinating legends. In an age where women weren't praised for grit or business acumen or unfailing dedication to art over home and family, these were women to be reckoned with. They weathered changing fortune not with happiness so much as triumph.

WWII found Paris overrun with Nazis. Coco had closed her shops in 1939 and took up residence in the Hôtel Ritz Paris, where she stayed through the Nazi occupation of Paris. During that time she was criticized for having an affair with a German officer/Nazi spy who arranged for her to remain in the hotel. The French despised her after that liaison. What did she do? Come out with a collection after the war the was a sensational hit in America.

Edith was a frequent performer at German Forces social gatherings in occupied France, and many people considered her a traitor. Following the war she claimed to have been working for the French resistance, but then she, and Coco, often lied about themselves. Despite the negative stigma, she remained a national and international favorite.

Small women of bad family and little education, they became enigmatic French icons. They became such with panache. It makes me want to stroll the banks of the Seine in Chanel humming Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien and nursing heartbreak with cigarettes and wine.

Review: theanyspacewhatever at the Guggenhiem

I groaned along with a few other people when the black and white film we were watching on beanbag chairs stopped in the middle, apparently on a continuous loop that never finishes. Since I had finished my free espresso, I got up and someone else jetted into my seat. The espresso bar's line had died down, and people mingled up and down the white ramp. Where was I?

--the not-so-stuffy Guggenheim. The Guggenheim in New York has taken on a playful approach this fall, with an "invitation to a core group of these artists—Angela Bulloch, Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, and Rirkrit Tiravanija—to collectively formulate a scenario for an exhibition," according to its press release for theanyspacewhatever.

'Relational aesthetics' makes an intimidating phrase. However, these artists, who take the exhibition as a medium, have turned the Guggenheim into a humanized and fun space where suddenly everything starts to look like art. The museum has been transformed into one sprawling art playground, where the whole experience becomes a user-friendly and interrelated series of experiences as one ascends the circular ramp. It starts with the marquee of flashing lights at the entrance, but this theatrical experience is one where the viewer is the star. The bare white spiral of the interior is punctuated with a plethora of details that humanize the space. On walking in, one looks up to see a glittering starry sky and down to see a Pinocchio submerged face down in the museum's small pool. What's the connection between these works? Only that they share the space with each other, created to work together to draw the viewer into the space, and make them more aware of their surroundings.

It works on you subtly at first, but becomes more and more interesting. I took my shoes off to watch part of a documentary on some cushions next to one of the TVs on the first level, thereby making myself part of the exhibition as I discovered when girls took photos of the scene, and me, from the balcony above. Associative chains of black words seemed randomly typed both in placement and meaning at first. They never take a structured narrative, but one becomes more in tune with a generalized significance. The sound of falling water immerses the viewer as he walks through a bare white tunnel, then he is lost in a brown cardboard maze with holes that you can peep through and art embedded where you are least likely to look. After a set of hotel bedroom furniture on a round glass platform, you arrive at my favorite part, the Illy espresso bar next to the beanbag movie theatre. Eventually, you reach a sign at the top telling you you have reached the end, and it really feels like a you have completed a journey.
This process-oriented way of experiencing the exhibit made me feel like a child, uninhibited. This is the kind of space where you can touch the art, drink the art, and walking through it makes you a part of the art. These ordinary objects, beds or words like half-formed thoughts, could be found outside the Guggenheim's walls. The New York Times reported that, "For a price and with a reservation, up to two people can spend the night. (Like so many must-dos in New York, it is sold out.)" Does it get more interactive than that?

It will be up until January 7, 2009, and in conjunction with the Catherine Opie retrospective also being exhibited, makes for a fun day at the museum. Instead of being boxed into to rectangular room and seeing things in gilt frames, you see Frank Gehry's design fully exploited in this spiral-patterned fun house. Instead of being told where to look and how, you are let loose to participate and peek where you like. How refreshing.

Darius Goes West, then to HBO if New York

Being from Athens, GA, I've heard of Darius more than once. My parents and friends from home have talked to me about the film, and told me last year about Darius graduating. So when I got an email yesterday asking me if I wanted to meet someone for the screening of Darius Goes West at the HBO Screening room last night, I figured I had to take her up on it, despite my headache. This won't be the most aesthetically-inclined post you'll read from me, but I wanted to say: you should see this film.

(I have a copy--I'll send it to you)

Why should you see some obscure documentary made in my hometown?

Many reasons, including that it is a well-done film on the personal adventure of a boy with Muscular Dystrophy going on a journey to get MTV to "pimp his ride" and that it has a great message spread by great people. DMD, the type of Muscular Dystrophy, that Darius has, can happen to any child, effectively shortening their lifespan to about 20 years of age as the muscles degenerate until the heart stops. So the 19 year old who rolled up on stage last night and splits his time between public advocacy and rapping isn't working for himself--but for the next generation of children. Filmed in 2005, Darius and his crew of friends rent an RV for a 3 week trip to California all the while trying to get MTV to agree to pimp his ride. Darius has so many memorable firsts: seeing the ocean, being away from his mother, going to Las Vegas.



Darius Goes West did the film festival circuit in 2007, winning 27 awards throughout the country. This year, they are trying to spread the film's message about DMD. They have been visiting schools and meetings across the country. Darius and his crew of friends have formed a foundation, are living off the proceeds of selling t shirts, and are trying to raise money by selling 1 million DVDs this year. Find out more at http://www.dariusgoeswest.org/.

The Remains of the Day

I remember the acting being top-notch in the film version of Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. So seeing it on the bookstore shelves, I thought it would be a nice story to settle down with one night, especially as I’ve a fondness for the pre-war British era. I agree with the promo copy on the back, “The novel rests firmly on the narrative sophistication and flawless control of tone…” A butler is the narrating protagonist with no personal life, and it is through Ishiguro’s excellent manipulation of diction and memory that through the butler’s words we gain a more complete picture of the man Stevens than he has of himself. Stevens is more butler than human, consistently rejecting any attempts at familiarity and placing all is efforts toward his profession. Naturally this leaves him alone at the end of his life, and the novel closes with his sitting on a pier at the end of a rare vacation at the end of the day. He has doubts about the integrity of the man he served, so that he is even denied the comfort of a knowing he contributed to the world. True to form, with a stiff upper lip, Stevens decides to work harder at bantering with his new American employer—both quite foreign to him—and the novel closes on neither a dismal or hopeful note. Rather, it affirms that life goes on, and one goes on with it as one ages and times change. Life is still life, and for all the flaws a character has or the “might have beens,” the life one has is the most precious one to try to live.
This being said, and excellent movie notwithstanding, this was not an inspired or great book. It was competently written with great attention to structure, tone and resolution. However, it felt predictable. I found Steven’s tone more wearing in its digressions than interesting. Perhaps it is merely a simple story of a stodgy butler past his prime, and not much more can be done with it. Perhaps his character, even as you watch it turn away from what it most wants without realizing it, lacks appeal. All he really seems to lack is the ability to change—is that what makes characters interesting? Perhaps the best way to explain is this: the book is exactly like its protagonist. That is a great compliment to the telling of it, while explaining its limitations are those of narrowness, singular viewpoint, and inflexibility. Fortunately for the novel, the tragedy of being left behind by the world was not a fate it shared.

Le Grand Bouffe

This 70s French film that I happened upon, quite by accident, left an impression on me much not unlike John Water’s Pink Flamingos. Rather than camp, this “comedy” that follows a group of men who have a houseparty one weekend to eat themselves to death, is quite dark. Both are unnerving in their complete lack of moral boundaries or “sane” reference point. The worlds are guided by an inner logic that trumps that of the world we know. In this sense, they are grotesques, curiosities of culture, much like the gargoyles and corbels of the most extravagent medieval cathedrals. The viewer simply watches powerless as the characters follow out the rules that they invented for their existence to their logical, extreme end. At the end, no sudden denoument unmasks them as aberrant psychologies—no things merely end as they had to, the characters being what they are. This is itself creates a cohesiveness, a harmony to the piece, which I think is one of its better qualities. The macbre subject matter has all the appeal of the macbre, and the odd combination of horror and laughter rather conquers the disgust one feels at watching the men, on the 3rd day into their gorging, becoming sick yet forcing themselves to eat pate and confit du canard and truffles with utter abandon. Adding to the orgiastic atmosphere is the apperance of a sweet local schoolteacher who becomes utter fascinated and one of the group. Some conflict arises as she sleeps with each man. Her sex is as unisexual, as grotesque, as the manner in which they eat. Perfectly desirable things, sex and food, become utter devoid of enticement during the film. Indeed, when it ended I was quite sure I never wanted to eat again. The ambivalence I felt nearly every moment while trying to decide whether to laugh or vomit was strong, and I couldn’t stop watching though I half-wanted to. It has a harmony all its own, and the plot impels one onward. And even though I haven’t seen it since that first time 4 years ago, scenes and images stick out so clearly in my head that I feel it must be a great work of art, and one that certainly opened my eyes to a new way of viewing life.