Cockles and mussles

This year’s Oscars seem a world away now. But one comment stuck in the brain for further thought. That of First Lady Michelle Obama when Jack Nicholson handed her the flame via video link to light up this year’s Best Film winner. She suggested that these films and filmmakers may allow and encourage people to “dream a bigger dream”. Which begged the question of American society and whether dreaming that dream was always such a good idea. The sky may be the limit as the adage goes but worryingly they are few and far between who warn one not to fly too close to that sun. Not that the First Lady in any way encouraged false hope. Far from it. The trouble with Britain as an economic player has always been so often that it just wouldn’t dream that dream thereby forfeiting and allowing foreign companies to profit from a lack of vision. So often, you were better off remaining an ‘under dog’ than parading one’s talents in that country. In fact one of Argo’s producers Graham King (a Brit made good in Hollywood) is on record as saying that Britain needs to make films that people everywhere want to go and see while not sacrificing quality for quantity or being lumbered with national identity traits. He certainly succeeded (though not for Britain) with Argo.  And though many Brit critics like to ‘pooh pooh’ the trad quality of Downton Abbey, it’s one of Britain’s greatest cultural export success s in living memory.

Without placing words into the First Lady’s mouth, surely what she meant was that Americans always need to be made aware that there is another reality to the one willfully and worryingly casually thrust upon them by themselves. Not that success or an alternative life is necessarily bad just that one needs find that success on one’s own terms and not on the prevailing winds of one’s neighborhood, friends, family, or ‘heaven for fend’ American TV.

Every year in New York, MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center team up for New Directors/New Films – this year’s Oscar for Best Live Action Short (Curfew) and Best Documentary (How to Survive a Plague) both screened at last year’s festival. And the journey of some of this year’s shorts is too worth watching,

Stampede

To Put Together a Helicopter (Para armar un helicopter)

Probably the most unforgettable film of this year’s 25 films and 3 shorts slot fest (described as more a “documentary of the imagination”) is Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (executive produced by Errol Morris and Werner Herzog). Participants of the Communist purge after Indonesia’s 1965 military coup are asked to re-enact their crimes. The idea was sparked by how readily and casually people posed smiling for photos in front of their horrific acts. And the film is certainly equal to any of the video art out there these days. The idea of these men dressing up (sometimes as their female victims in make up with Bollywood style dance routines) stems directly from the milieu they originated from- that of the black marketeers of movie tickets. Even to the extent of extolling the virtues of the gangster in the word’s original meaning of ‘free man’. “It’s not about fear it’s about image,” says one, “I know a good torture scene [location]” with some of the noirish scenes easily straight out of a Jean-Pierre Melville film. “War crimes are determined by the winners [so what makes us different from any other victorious nation]”. The film is prefaced by Voltaire’s dictum: "It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
UK released by Dogwoof June 28.

This is surely the most inventive, provocative, mesmerizing and unbelievable film about war crimes you are ever likely to see - included in that judgement is the documentary The Gatekeepers (UK released by Metrodome April 12).

And you kinda need a paragraph devoted just to fresh air as a break before discussing anything else in the festival. 

Other films from ND/NF that stayed in the mind of this website were:

Les Coquillettes- directed by (and also acting) Sophie Letourneur

A Hijacking 
(UK released May 10 by Arrow Films)

The Shine of Day - with one of Germany’s most respected theatre actors Philipp Hochmair

Anton’s Right Here - familiar territory but no less poignant through its subject Anton realizing that the documentary camera can be a liberating friend and not an invader.

the beautifully photographed Küf

Viola-

combining theatrical conceit with filmic inventiveness and invasiveness – directed by Matías Piñeiro

and noteworthy if perhaps a touch self-conscious -

Towheads- directed (and starring) Shannon Plumb with indy film director stalwart Derek Cianfrance as her husband whose face we barely ever see and with his 2 real life kids on screen who we unregrettably see loads of.

Tower - directed by Kazik Radwanski

Upstream Color  - directed by Shane Carruth

The Fest’s closing night film:

Our Nixon collates the Super 8 film of Nixon’s aides- much of which has simply sat in an FBI vault for decades. Is it revelatory? Well, yes and no. Nixon has always been an easy scapegoat and guy to hate. But just as Oliver Stone’s Nixon film tried to show he was a far more complex and interesting guy if reprehensible.  And so much of the footage and audio here is just priceless as historical documentation. So, see for yourself.

Former film critic Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighboring Sounds (Som ao redor) from last year’s ND/NF is UK released on March 22 by Artificial Eye (Cinema Guild released in the States)

And from this year’s Rendez-vous with French Cinema Fest, arrives Ozon’s In theHouse (UK released by Momentum)

And though this year’s festival wasn’t quite as full of fascinating gems as last year several films still stay in the mind:

You Will Be my Son

The Girl from Nowhere – great performances and an interesting idea that just misses going somewhere.

Augustine

Three Worlds – when the big dream collides into  reality

and Jacques Doillon’s perhaps over-long You, Me and Us whose inherent emotional theatricality bears similarities to Viola in ND/NF- you might say Racine as compared to Pirandello.

Note that Eureka DVD has some great French releases in its Masters of Cinema series:

The ever relevant and still blackly funny Poison (1951)

Chabrol’s feature debut Le Beau Serge (1958) and Les Cousins

and the great Italian Fellini’s City of Women (1980)

Eureka’s (like Criterion’s in the States) are all about championing innovation in cinema. But is anything shocking anymore? Can it be? Eureka brought us The Human Centipede that outdoes ND/NF’s Upstream Color by miles.  You’d wished that the latter had gone more in its Manchurian Candidate direction: the prevalence of mind, body, environment manipulation in America. But it wasn’t the film the director wished to make. His call. CNN revealed the shocking (but hardly surprising) facts of soldiers’ testimonials a few months ago and how the U.S. military used them as guinea pigs (The Narcotics Farm doco covered similar ground).

New York’s The Armory Show celebrated its 100^th anniversary this year coinciding with the celebration of Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 Bride Stripped Bare of her Bachelors.

Dancing around Duchamp at London's Barbican.

We quote from our betters..

The Guardian’s: Adrian Searle: “Rauschenberg famously declared that he wanted to work in the gap between art and life. Cage announced that he wanted to eradicate the difference. Duchamp said he wanted to turn his life into art, and that he believed in the artist, but wasn't so sure about art. Johns, or rather his painting, said "No". Over his long career, Johns's art has both veiled and detailed the private – whether it was his everyday life in the studio or a map of the house he grew up in, while always maintaining a poker-faced refusal to explain. Perhaps that's what he meant by that NO.”

Peter Conrad’s Observer review of George Bellows’ Royal Academy show:

“The muscular tension and fraught distortion of the figures in Stag at Sharkey's gives them an unexpected modernity. The painting dates from 1909, four years before the Armory Show brought cubism and post-impressionism to bewildered, scandalised New York and caused Theodore Roosevelt – a president as well as an art critic, whose gospel of "the strenuous life" Bellows often seems to be illustrating – to rail at the lunacy of "European extremists". Roosevelt particularly scorned Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, and wondered if the painter belonged to the school of "Parallelopipedonists, or Knights of the Isosceles Triangle".” Echoes of our beloved Richard M. Nixon there.

Eric Shiner (director of The Andy Warhol Museum since July 2011) postured at one of this year’s Armory Show Open Forums (Sun 3pm): “What is shocking? Or has contemporary art come to a point where nothing is shocking?”  There was little if ANYTHING that transgressed let alone shocked. Except for the temperature differential of Pier 94 and that between front and back of Pier 92-  a sort of unintentional Miami-New York comment. In comparison to most work on show (for the first time you could see almost everything (98%) on ArtSy) John Latham’s 1991 God is Great (LissonGallery) looked as if it had been written yesterday. There was even an artificial snowman in one of the passageways. But it was hard not to believe that the London effort of this website wasn’t a tad more interesting.

Artist Alec Soth on the panel noted: “encountering reality at this point is transgressive…the ambition of transgression is almost always going to be bought” Another speaker pointed out the irony that in MFA’s students are “taught the business of art when [now] there really is no business”.  And writer/journalist John Bowe felt just being polite was transgressive enough these days and noted “the smallness of the conversation” in the art world and that “newspapers are going the same way”.  Also on the panel was Participant Inc’s founder Lia Gangitano –and all the conversation made her last show celebrating Andy Kaufman sound the equal of Duchamp!

To, perhaps, the chagrin of many and the glee of others, artist Liz Magic Laser was commissioned this year to design all the merchandising and invites for The Armory Show. Somewhat turning a mirror on the fair itself and treating the commission as an advertising campaign with very pertinent results – the creative process on show in the Focus USA section (curated by Shiner) - and Liz’s work was arguably the most radical there. Gagosian had enough wooden floor space to mount a dance event. But didn’t. We hope greater things from Shiner's Genesis P-Orridge show this summer.

One heartening fact gleaned at the show was that International Corporate Art was successfully introducing contemporary art on a fairly massive scale to its guests on Celebrity Cruises.

One pale mermaid

tankers and cruise ships are caught between motion and understanding

or the very least questioning

She seems so small

not even worthy of a capital f- polite or no

yet she straddles the safe harbour of that

and the allowance of nature's black, blue utterance in that small benign blue strip beyond

Her color no longer needs interpretation

And as if her plinth were there for sole human industrial scale

grandeur beyond the grayest means.

New Jersey sputters.

New York complains. as always

as Her canvas itself wasnt enough.

she maintains a presence of being not defiance

ready as if at will

prepared to jump over the wobbly pale line of reason into adventure.

her Wordsworth farewell of "how arrogant is she when HER parents and neighbours heart is heard no more."

the Dutch made you and defeated you

did she ever realise how arrogant was build against her forbears' beautiful line of reason

and then was the darkness

And she stood alone.

 

 Poem Copyright 2013 Andrew Lucre