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

abide with me.. PART 2

The Tribeca Film Festival was born out of an economic and cultural revival need for the downtown area after the 9/11 attacks.  As this year’s Sundance Film fest gears up and crazier folk than I humiliatingly queue up and beg in the freezing cold to see movies that can be seen in far more relative comfort later on, it seems a good point to reflect on last year’s Tribeca Festival-  arguably doing best these days in offering up documentaries that despite their success at Tribeca, for many, sadly aren’t taken up by other media outlets. And interestingly the ones that were (both in the US and UK) weren’t the ones that this blog found most impressive (UK distributor Dogwoof picked 2 titles that were very in line with their quality target audience). Outgoing NYFF artistic director Richard Peña noted in a conversation at this year’s NYFF that Sundance is now more an audition for Hollywood and that no more are Indy movies to be seen as an alternative to Hollywood.  Peña also a comparison with the catholic Mass that is probably wiser not to quote;)

Tribeca has the trappings of an alternative Hollywood fest most obvious in its PR bandwagons, sponsorship deals and premiers. Nonetheless, the Festival still maintains a programming that is food for thought rather than ‘art-house’. Yet there was no film (narrative or documentary) that either lulled us into fascination of our fellow humans or grabbed us by the scruff of the neck shaking us to look in the vein of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer or Lodge Kerrigan's Keane.

More economic recession woes in Downeast - a depressing tale of an Italian entrepreneur who came to save a destitute canned lobster meat factory and who almost single-handedly (with his workers) revitalises this little town in Maine. The who-dunnit is: were his plans scuppered by competitor greed across the border and/or general apathy?  At times the reality smacked of Hollywood. But it was real alright. So too was The World Before Her (top documentary competition prize at Tribeca). Director Nisha Pahuja bravely juxtaposing the 20 finalists in Mumbai’s Miss India pageant (whose lead subject preaches the event’s female empowerment), with a Durga Vahini camp (the women’s branch of the extremist Vishwa Hindu Parishad- the “Hindu Taliban”) where intelligent teenagers believe their adherence to violence is truly freedom fighting. More utter belief observed in Scott Thurman's The Revisionaries and The Texas State Board of Education's (gods of what’s published in American kids’ textbooks as Texas is the largest market) adherence and promulgation of the Christian Creationist view of evolution. The doco’s lead is Don McLeroy (Chairman of the Board for 2 years), a thoroughly decent, nice guy- I met him. And he argues his stance with a charm and eloquence that’s never laced with cynicism or connivance- the same manner which Thurman engages you in his film. Dinosaurs were on Noah’s Ark. Much as many of the less Fundamentalist pro-assault rifle gun lobby are currently arguing their case in America. (I hasten to add I present those last two agendas without cynicism or agreement).  

Sexy Baby cast three women as female empowerment/exploitation doco subjects but undeniably centre stage was young teen Winnifred who if she could would have her own TV show- surely more bearable than those of her older peers;) Laura’s  (22) labiaplasty was better discussed in a Channel Four doc some years back (mentioned somewhere on my site). But given the imagery in our ether, it seemed very hypocritical to argue and deny Winnifred her moment of semi-naked Facebook glory. Searching for Sugarman was there last year but best new documentary director went to Jeroen van Velzen for Wavumba- an advocate doc if ever there was one for getting back to life’s essentials. Masoud is an ageing sharkhunter on the coast of Kenya tries passing on his expertise and passion to his young recruit with failing results.

Amir Naderi an Iranian filming in Japan made the fascinating if slightly long and all too knowing Cut about a man so obsessed with keeping his cine-club above water that he accepts money to be hit. Could there be a better metaphor for sticking to your art-house cinema guns against all odds?  The final 100 blows is a countdown of 100 films. And even some of the most respected film critics in the world will be stumped by some of these.

Consuming Spirits was a beautiful, meditative animation (just NY released) that evoked the palimpsests of William Kentridge. But there was only one narrative film (well two-Postcards from the Zoo that played last year’s Edinburgh Fest) that really stayed in your mind rather than simply being thoughtful and/or entertaining after the Festival. Former Swedish TV director Levan Akin’s Certain People that gathered a bunch of young bourgeois friends for gallerist Katinka’s country estate birthday party. There was a soft-focus almost ‘Elvira Madigan’ quality (Linus Rosenqvist) that belied the terrible ennui of its characters. Think a Joachim Trier movie doped with a quinine martini that’s until the cocktail wears off and reality sets in. If this film had say a French art house director’s name attached it would easily have gained a theatrical release. It’s a Carnage for those who just haven't taken that mescaline rush just yet. And finally, mention must be made of The Fourth Dimension- Harmony Korine directing one of three short films together with Polish filmmakers Alexey Fedorchenko and Jan Kwiecinski. And Josh Koury and Myles Kane’s Journey to Planet X- will that make it into this year’s London Sci-Fi Fest? The Arrival of Mr Wang in the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Italian season was a refreshing new politically incorrect take on the sci-fi genre.

And actor James Franco’s Francophenia - a film almost universally loathed at the Tribeca screenings but was actually a very savvy straight faced satire of the art/film celebrification process. At least me hopes it was! Unfortunately for America’s there’s so much out there that does this kinda stuff with absolute sincerity sans satire. Now where are those lemmings going….

What saturated American indie film culture this year was the new hybrid of Mumblecore: Amoebacore or a trawling through the minutia of everyday lived experience elevating it a few steps up from the microscope.  Definitions are difficult. Perhaps there’s a transparency to the former rather than the latter. Maybe Amoebacore gets stuck between a rock and a hard place as we all do in life.  Frances Ha (NYFF) didn’t quite seem like Mumblecore to me nor did it feel gravitating to a ‘Sundance’ movie as did LolaVersus (Tribeca). Nonetheless, it felt incomplete. And maybe that is the point. Now, Forager (ND/NF) seemed altogether more interesting and just not Mumblecore. Perhaps the ‘grown-up’ version was Celeste and Jesse Forever (Dec 7, UK) about well, not ‘growing up’. And compared to much Mumblecore, the total artifice of Ruby Sparks seemed to hit the actor/writer/audience conundrum right on the head.

Most people in Britain and America will never see most of the films written about here. If they did would the world be a better place? Unlikely. But is that the point? Does the mindless mush of Hollywood (present company excluded of course) rom-com and gratuitous violence make the world a worse place? The latter genre has been debated ad infinitum. And a Brit film Peeping Tom (1960) became a lynch pin in that debate long ago. What is worrying (to use a euphemism) in the current gun culture debate is that everything in America ultimately becomes about presentation and possession in relation to the ‘other’. My home, my family, my happiness substituted with ‘your’ in advertising.  If you project fear will fear find you? Clearly there are many well-adjusted, caring, non-greedy people whom fear and violence seek out for no apparent reason. There’s no doubt that the pro-gun lobby have reason to fear. 

But there was a deeply distressing incident in London that just can’t be erased and is a salient incident (albeit isolated) to remember in this debate. And that’s the police shooting on the London underground of Jean Charles de Menezes. Cutting to the chase. Forget the whys and wherefores of whether these highly armed police should have had better information etc etc. The facts of the actual shooting are horrifying. The officers were supposedly trained in Israeli-style terrorist intervention tactics (SO19 firearms officers trained by the SAS). The bullets in the guns were specially designed high velocity 'hollow-point bullets' so as to explode in the brain and kill the target and avoid ‘collateral damage’ around the target. The target in question was seated in the underground carriage not escaping but apparently did move towards not thrust at an officer, in close proximity to the police and yet supposedly these two highly trained officers needed 7 shots to the head (11 shell casings were found) and one to the shoulder to achieve their objective.  Enough is enough.

The crux of course is not whether you think officers should and should not be armed, on or off duty, whether or not there was a ‘shoot to kill’ policy (vehemently denied by the Met police). The officers weren’t to know the Brazilian man was the wrong target and innocent. Let’s put all emotion aside. The crux is: if such highly trained and respected officers couldn’t even properly hit their ‘sitting duck’ target should we really be allowing military calibre assault rifles even into the hands of well-meaning, level-headed, much vetted intelligent individuals and even police officers on or off duty? 

To many it seems a ‘cop out’ to immerse oneself, one’s life in the culture of films and art. But the argument for these art forms helping us see the world more clearly is even stronger than both pro and anti gun lobby groups combined. Allowing the link between violence on TV/film and violence in the streets to have legs is a very dangerous road to travel.  Society is at fault and its own our backyards that we must be contemplating.  But first we must train ourselves to see more clearly what is there. Many American broadcasters have detailed some very effective anti-gun violence work being done (and there are many British police constabularies doing the same) by both State and Federal law officers that doesn’t involve an executive Presidential order overriding the democratic process. And as Jon Stewart pointed out on his satirical The Daily Show, how can it be that the law prevents me from buying an over sized sugar beverage or leaving the store without proper hot coffee insulation for my hand and yet most ordinary folk can purchase with equal ease ammunition and assault rifles and go have some fun. Wherever you gravitate in the debate - sympathy or empathy - the hypocritical stench of a society protecting its citizens is undeniable. 

Trying to end on a grim note, a story hit the virals yesterday of a N. Virginian sighting of what seemed a baby lion roaming the streets. Instead, it turned out to be a shaven/dyed labrador Charlie looking like such who was used as a mascot in the town. Now what if people had started shooting at Charlie. They had every reason to think they were doing the right thing and protecting American citizens. They were fearful but did they really look hard enough at what of they were fearful. Enough said.

The 2012 Planet Lucre film survival list:

Comment was to be added as to why these films are in my list below. But having written that long pre-amble it’s probably more elucidating just to list them (and allows me to cheat a little by writing less:). As they say, less is more. If you’ve seen some or many of the films you will understand. If not, there’s another world to explore;) In no order whatsoever-

Yet to open or be released in UK:

Lincoln

Hitchcock

UK released-

Argo

Woman in a Dressing Gown

Ordet (The Word)

Passion of Joan of Arc  

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Coriolanus

Wild Bill

This Must Be the Place

Seeking a Friend for The End Of The World

(not a great script/film but there was something raw in those performances from Steve Carell and Keira Knightley that eats away at you)

Nostalgia for the Light

Oslo, August 31st

The Raid

Once Upon a Time In Anatolia

Patience (After Sebald) 

The Dictator  

To Rome With Love

Carnage

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Berberian Sound Studio

The Deep Blue Sea

Damsels in Distress

The Cabin in the Woods

Acts of Godfrey

(when are you ever to see again a film all in rhyming verse!)

Bernie

and in the New York Film Festival 2012 past and scheduled UK release:

The Gatekeepers/Shomerei Ha’saf (Dror Moreh)

Holy Motors (Léos Carax)

Ginger and Rosa (Sally Potter)

Hyde Park on Hudson (Roger Michell)

No (Pablo Larrain)

Caesar Must Die (Cesare deve morire) (Taviani Brothers) 

The Bay

Not UK released:

Werner Schroeter retrospective (MoMA, New York)

Justine (MoMA)

Tender is the Wolf (MoMA)

Found Memories

Now, Forager

Teddy Bear

Certain People

Twilight Portrait

The Ambassador

Porfirio

The Painting

The animations of Sally Cruikshank

And no scheduled UK release for NYFF 2012:

Bwakaw (Jun Robles Lana)

Memories Look at Me (Song Fang) 

Downpour 

Odd Man Out 

Liv and Ingmar 

You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet (Vous n’avez encore rien vu) (Alain Resnais) 

Jeff Preiss (new work)

Nathaniel Dorsky (new work) 

Native Son     

"Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge. If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment. What expert judgment, in art, could ever bear on the work to come?"

Essays Critical and Clinical- Deleuze

ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH 2012

Martin Margulies reads the large and small print at the opening of Miami Basel 2012: that's why he's a rich business and art collector and the rest of us aren't;)
(art work behind is the Corruption Contract by Superflex) 

Richard Tuttle with his new very large book in the foreground

his lecture featured discussion about his passion for textiles

Vito Acconci speaking at Design Miami
Video HERE

You can find more photos of the Miami fairs HERE

please remember that all photos are copyright Andrew Lucre 2012
(gimme a break, I don't even charge a dime!)