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: