3 Artists addendum

So I forgot to tie my three filmmakers together with a Big Idea, but no worries.  With cinema there's one big idea that's never too far away no matter the project and our biggest local film fest captures it exactly: True/False.  Cinema may be the closest we get to a pure expression of reality (though interactive media, most broadly explored in "video game" format is perhaps a hint of something even closer), but it is still--in the words of Pier Paolo Pasolini--"a certain reality."

Danse Serpentine offers an easy entrance to this idea.  The goal of the filmmaker in coloring his/her print was to get a closer rendering of the spectacle of Loie Fuller's dance work than could be achieved through the mere mechanical works available to him/her at the time.  But does this extra-mechanical rendering--the hand coloring of the print--somehow make it less documentary?  Must an image be produced by a mute machine to be called documentary?  Aren't we kidding ourselves by trying to make that distinction?  Machines, being man-made, create images that are man-made.  To tinker with a machine's image only adds another link to the chain of extraction (or abstraction).

By the time Orson Welles made F for Fake, he had already become something of a myth.  Unable or unwilling to do things through the studio system, Welles scrambled from project to project using his credibility--his obstinacy and artistry--to secure independent funding for his projects.  But in an irony that he seems to have been fully aware of, he devoted inordinate amounts of time fighting the strings attached to the money that he'd secured through such a thorough demonstration of his willingness to fight against any and all such strings.  He was burning the candle at any and every end he could come to.  F for Fake is a magnificent expression of the corner that he'd painted himself in but it also must be taken with many grains of salt.  I don't want to give anything away but by the end of watching the film it becomes clear that Welles notion of illusion extends well beyond the trompe l'oeil of clever editing.

Finally, something that I really love about Terrence Malick is the respect for cinematic spectacle that he seems to share with the neo-realists of the 50s and 60s.  Although The Thin Red Line wonders broadly from the novel its based on (which was, in turn, based on the experiences of its author James Jones), it strives to get the details right--from the yellow grenades to the Japanese's deep jungle camp.  Malick seems to be concerned with capturing reality on multiple levels: as the details experienced at a particular time and in a particular place (which, in this case, are faked/recreated), as the reality of a particular set of people engaged in the process of recreating that particular time and place (the actors retracing the events of the script/novel: real people experiencing more or less real emotions and circumstances), and as the reality of the conveyance of these details and experiences into the lives of the audience (by way of the director's agenda: in Malick's case, his commitment to his particular philosophy and aesthetic).  All of these things can be said to be realistically or honestly represented but the viewer gets nearer or further from the "truth" depending on which lens of reality is being examined.

On Film: 3 Artists

This is perhaps a bit wide of the box, but film has really had my interest of late and there are a lot of filmmakers that strike me as visual artists and really, why on Earth should a moving image be any less of an art object than a still one.  So, here goes…

By way of transition from the staid and true art of the museum world, here’s something I came across in the Pompidou:

Mesmerizing isn’t it?  The Pompidou’s info card has this listed as Anonymous, although the dance and costume are attributed to Loie Fuller.  A quick Wikipedia search shows that Fuller was known for her innovative use of stage lighting to create effects of illumination in combination with her costumes.  It seems that the filmmaker here painstakingly and lovingly hand colored the film in an effort to mimic the effect.

I fell for Orson Welles a long time ago after seeing Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil but by a happy accident I was flipping through the channels thinking about going to bed one night recently when I came across one of his last films, F for Fake.  I was tired but I couldn’t stop watching.  Having just recently watched Exit Through the Gift Shop, I was stunned by the parallels.  Not only were the exact same themes being explored by Welles, but the style and methods were very similar.  Welles made F for Fake in 1974(!) and everything about it is shockingly innovative, from the frenetic editing to the casual blend of documentary and farcical (tumbling into fictional) elements.  Welles was conscious of what he was doing too, describing it as a “new type of film” and a “essay in film.”  Here’s a beautiful, though not quite representative passage, a meditative moment from somewhere near the middle of the film:

Finally, I missed Tree of Life while it was in theaters but I’m eagerly awaiting the Blu Ray release.  I recently made the jump to high definition with a new television and Blu Ray player and Terrence Malick’s 1998 film The Thin Red Line was one of the first I bought on Blu Ray so I just recently re-experienced it in high def glory.  It was probably the first “art” film that I ever saw because Malick is one of the few art house directors with enough Hollywood clout to still get major releases and this was two years before the original Ragtag Cinema Café would grace Columbia’s downtown culture.  Malick’s ability to continue to release to major theaters is even more remarkable when you consider that the usual fair at Ragtag is really more ‘indie’ than ‘art house’ with films that deviate only slightly from mainstream script and filmmaking conventions.  Malick as a filmmaker is very nearly a world unto himself.  He seems to focus primarily on the composition of his shots, looking for poetic imagery while his scripts operate almost independently of his direction giving the actors something to do while he moves in, about and around them.  It’s like he commissions a play and then creates his film as the play is performed, usually radically re-editing and disregarding the story as he creates something new from it through use of voice over and soundtrack.  Anyway, if you’ve never seen The Thin Red Line it’s even more dream-like and beautiful than it appears in this trailer but here’s a taste:

Speak and the Crisis of Adolescence

In reading through Speak, the aspect of adolescence that stung with the sharpest nostalgia (though we rarely associate nostalgia with unpleasantness) was Melinda's helplessness in the face of overwhelming dysfunction in the people and institutions that are supposed to serve as her caretakers.  If anything, Melinda is extraordinarily sensitive in accurately detecting the presence and causes of this dysfunction.  I suspect that few junior high/high school students truly share her gifts.  They know enough to be bitter, angry, and withdrawn--to be sure--but rarely do their observations or rebellions strike the deserving targets.

At least that was the case for me when I moved with my family from the small town I grew up with in the summer between seventh and eighth grades.  The crisis I experienced was largely the result of academic discord and disappointment.  In my home town I had ranked at the top of my academic class but the curriculums were so vastly mismatched between my old school and my new one that I found myself quickly buried beneath the workload.  If I recognized the problem, I certainly couldn't articulate it.  I floundered and did my best to ignore school and minimize its significance in my life.  This was, necessarily, a losing battle, since school would continue to be my greatest time commitment for the next five years, but--as an adolescent--the qualities of inaction were as novel a solution for problem solving as the variety of alternatives that were, as yet, a vague, unruly, and likely disappointing lot.

The misfortune of my ill-timed move and subsequent academic struggle pales in comparison to Melinda's lot but I felt I could identify with her response.  The mingling of Melinda's tragic rape with the more insidious brutalities that accompany our first tastes of the adult world is perhaps a shortcoming of the book, or, at least, a shortcoming of its role as a tool to provide insight into the adolescent mind.  Rape is abhorrent and--I imagine--extraordinarily traumatic.  So, it would not be unreasonable to expect a similar shift in personality/psychology for a victim of rape regardless of age.  The book seems to suggest a brighter horizon for Melinda at the end and the character is perhaps clever and resilient enough to proceed brilliantly into her sophomore year, but anyone who has their image of the world and their self-image strongly shaken at a formative point can probably expect to carry certain habits of mind well beyond their initial recovery.  As for me, I have little more faith in the adult world and the Deciders that helm our institutions than I did when I was 14.  The hard-earned difference, acquired somewhere along the 16 intervening years, is that I no longer think it expedient to ignore them.