Azazel Jacobs has made a short film for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The 90 minute film, called I See, is the first in a series that MoMA plans to commission, at the rate of one per year, from filmmakers who screen work in their spring New Directors/New Films series. I See is screening before programs in MoMA’s Titus screening rooms, and is also posted on the Museum’s YouTube channel. See it embedded below the jump.
If you hadn’t seen Con Artist, Michael Sladek’s “docu-comedy” on 80s art star Mark Kostabi, but walked blindly into the theater in the middle of the film’s Q & A last Tuesday, you’d have a fair sense of the dynamic between filmmaker and subject. When asked to account for the film’s playful, comic tone, Sladek said, “I had no intention to make a serious film about the art world. I had no intention to make a documentary, frankly.” At this point, Kostabi, standing next to Sladek, turned his side to the crowd to whisper conspiratorially, apparently offering directions to the director. Sladek did his best to ignore them. “I prefer to make narratives, because I can control them.”
Sladek entered Kostabi’s world (and Kostabi World - the studio where dozens of assistants have for years conceived and executed Kostabi’s paintings, which are not quite synonymous with his art) years after his 80s heyday and 90s reversal of fortune. With steady income flowing in from sales of his art artifacts on the Italian auction circuit, by the mid-00s Kostabi refashioned his performative assault on the art market into a cable access and web-distributed game show called Title This (which I wrote about in 2007, accidentally angering its fans with my use of the word “himbo”). Con Artist mostly offers evidence that Kostabi has devolved into a sad joke in the context of the art world, but sad jokes are all the rage online and on low-rent TV. In positing Title This as Kostabi’s barely-noticed comeback gambit, it reveals the show’s birlliance as a kind of natural evolution of Kostabi’s schtick for the proverbial Internet Age. In paying art world figures, including critics, to title his paintings, Kostabi outsources the labor of meaning-making to those who’d do it after the fact anyway, and updates his performance of total detachment into a DIY episodic spectacle in the process.
In her review of artist Brock Enright’s 2007 multi-media exhibition Good Times Will Never Be the Same, New York Times critic Roberta Smith summed up her somewhat bemused pan with a general statement of disapproval for the image under which Enright has molded himself, as a kind of bad boy trafficking in the surreal aesthetics of fear. “Mr. Enright’s art has more energy and ideas than clarity or purposefulness,” Smith wrote. “It is also trailed by debts — to Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelly, The Blair Witch Project and Stanley Kubrick for starters — that need to be sorted through. In the process he might examine his faith in mess for mess’s sake.” This faith of Enright’s propels Jody Lee Lipes’ documentary on the creation of that art show, Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be The Same, which premiered at SXSW and won a special jury prize for cinematography at the Sarasota Film Festival (full disclosure: I was on the jury that gave the film a special award for cinematography). Enright’s faith that if he makes it, he’ll be able to sell it –– regardless of what “it” is –– creates an expectation of an resolution which, ultimately, Lipes backs away from playing into. He’s more interested in how his subject’s endless faith in mess, and the increasingly unacceptable methods which feed into it, is both seductive and destructive in his personal relationships.
Guest of Cindy Sherman is a dense and fast-paced portrait of one man’s loss of innocence at the hands of his beloved –– at least, as far as “innocence” can be taken to be synonymous with “unpunctured ego”, and “beloved” can be taken to refer to the big bad art world in addition to, and perhaps ahead of, the famous photographer namechecked in the title. Co-directed by Tom Donahue and Paul H-O (shortened from Hasegawa-Overacker), the film trails the latter’s self-engineered insinuation (based on a formula of 2 parts brattiness, 1 part careerist ambition) into the social scene surrounding the Soho art scene of the 90s, which eventually took over his own social life when he began a five year romantic relationship with Sherman, which in turn absorbed his personal and professional identity. The premise alone sounds too navel-gazing by half, but at its best Guest offers H-O’s story as a parable for the universal loss of self that every long-term relationship portends. The film also plays as a kind of easily digestible time capsule of several decades worth of contemporary art, tracking a move towards mass market mania and concurrent, undeniable bleeding of personal idiosyncrasy. Paul H-O enters the story as a party crasher; by the time he exits, it seems there’s no longer a party to crash. …Read more
When it comes to It Came From Kuchar, Jennifer M. Kroot’s deceptively breezy documentary about experimental filmmaker brothers George and Mike, I am without a doubt a member of the choir. George Kuchar was my independent study advisor when I was an undergraduate at the San Francisco Art Institute, and much of Kroot’s film documents his life and times at that alma mater of mine. George is seen clomping through the bayside, architectural masterpiece of a campus, slightly hunched, with appreciative students trailing off him like some kind of handycam-weilding, Bronx-accented, beautiful schlock-peddling pied piper. George isn’t the right professor for everyone — as John Waters puts it in the film, “I think some of his students are probably horrified and leave” — but for me, as a very, very serious studier of cinema who took my own attempts at filmmaking very, very seriously, George gave me a much-needed license to have fun with film, to play and pursue the weird. As Brook Hinton, another SFAI stallwart, says of George’s work in the film, it’s “profound, has great beauty, and yet doesn’t take itself too seriously.” George Kuchar is a walking whoopie cushion n a world of art school pretensions … except, you know, funny.
So I can’t proclaim distance, but I can express my appreciation for Kroot’s film as a creative exemplar of how to make a talking head documentary becomes , and salute it as a much-needed work of historiography. As Anthology Film Archives’ Andrew Lampert notes on screen, there is no complete Kuchar filmography — George in particular works so fast, and with an attitude that renders distinctions between video diary, collaborations with students, and his “Real” movies so meaningless, that even the completists can’t completely keep up. Kroot’s film is clearly the result of intimate access to not only the brothers and their films (thus rendering the doc something like a Greatest Hits reel with commentary), but even to some of their unused archival footage.
Jody Lee Lipes, cinematographer of Antonio Campos‘ Afterschool, makes his feature length directorial debut with the SXSW Emerging Visions selection Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be the Same, a beautifully shot doc about an artist struggling to maintain a somewhat normal domestic relationship while producing a half-baked, largely inscrutable but still vaguely offensive installation for a New York gallery. Below the jump, check out the film’s trailer, as well as Lipes’ answers to The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone.
The posters for Watchmen herald “the visionary director of 300,” but many of the visions in Zack Snyder’s latest directorial feat owe just as much to the efforts of production designer Alex McDowell. A veteran of projects as far reaching as Fight Club and Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, McDowell applies a deeply calculated, undeniably intellectual methodology to his projects, making him the perfect world-builder for a dense project like Watchmen. “Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore built this very realistic but stylized version of realism in the graphic novel,” McDowell says. “We looked to do the same.” In this gallery, he elaborates on his meticulous design work.
The War Room
In one of the more interesting visual embellishments on the source material, Snyder and McDowell designed a presidential war room reminiscent of the one in Dr. Strangelove. “It was actually very good that the film took so long to be made,” reasons McDowell. “There was a recontextualizing of the story with regard to everything that occurred in the past twenty years — culturally, historically, but mostly pop-culturally, so that you know now the context of Dr. Strangelove’s war in respect to contemporary history of what was going on.”
The Circuit points to the news that a Los Angeles art gallery has mounted a show of the paintings of Adele Lack, the estranged wife of Caden Cotard, whose portrait graces the catalog for the show. Which is interesting, because both Lack and Cotard are fictional characters, played by Catherine Keener and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, NY, which not coincidentally opens in New York and LA on Friday.
Even more interesting, a number of art and culture blogs have written up the opening of the show without noting even the connection to the film, never mind the fact that the paintings themselves are movie props and the artist to which they’re credited doesn’t actually exist. One site even includes an image of Keener from the film, without indicating that they’re aware that it’s a publicity still not of an artist, but of a sort-of famous actress playing an artist.
It certainly seems like clever surreptitious marketing for the film — especially for this film, which resists relegraphing its intent or meaning –– but maybe it’s *too* clever? If the show itself is as free of Synecdoche signage as many of the blog posts about it, at what point are patrons of the show (which ends on Sunday) going to make the connection?
Hearing about Jennifer Montgomery’s Deliver, an all-female remake of John Boorman’s 1972 Deliverance, having its world premiere at BAMcinématek this evening, I got the same feeling I had when my friend Rose told me about her sister’s all-female, Motley Crue tribute band Girls Girls Girls. How exciting! Upending and giving the finger to notions of gender and sexuality always gets me all hot and bothered. As did watching Burt Reynolds strut his sexy stuff in Boorman’s original (with its screenplay and book by that ornery southern, man’s man James Dickey).
So who would take on the Burt Reynolds role of Lewis – the dude who stands apart from the rest of his male bonding, canoe trip comrades? …Read more
A special round-up this afternoon, featuring bloggy memories of Manny Farber:
“What I found, and find, most valuable in his criticism is his ability to apprehend the entirety of a film—he got it from every angle,” writes Glenn Kenny. “I doubt that Farber was particularly surprised by Godard’s Breathless, because his criticism actively anticipated that film.”
“To prove my size, and yours, here’s some of his enormity.” Ryland Walker Knight offers images of two of Farber’s paintings.
“He remains our best,” says Ray Pride. “A curmudgeon, but a painstaking one who concedes that his effects are like the layering and smearing and reworking of layers of paint, that he is ‘unable to write anything at all without extraordinary amounts of rewriting.’”
Artist and experimental filmmaker Bruce Conner has died at the age of 75. He’s maybe best known for his first film, the 1958 assemblage A Movie; his most recent film, Easter Morning, a pure cinema short shot in the 60s and recently released to celebrate Conner’s 50th anniversary, screened in competition last month at CineVegas. Ray Pride has much, much more at Movie City Indie. I’ve embedded one of Conner’s more surprising works, a short set to Devo’s “Mongoloid,” above.
“It is a travesty that Mekas’ stark vision of elegiac melancholia has not been rewarded with the coveted Golden Popcorn statue,” Boston University film studies professor Ray Carney said. “His [1997] film Letter From Nowhere—Laiskas Is Niekur No. 1 should have easily walked away with Best On-Screen Duo, or Best Kiss, or at least Best Ass.”
Tee hee and everything, but there actually isn’t a huge gulf between Mekas’ most recent major project and the kind of thing you might see on post-Tila Tequila MTV.
“So I remember we– I had like two or three days or something and I rehearsed and choreographed and dressed my brothers. I choreographed them with the piece and picked the songs, picked the medley. And not only that. You have to work out all the camera angles and, oh, I direct and edit everything I do. Every shot you see, is my shot.” -Michael Jackson, on his preparation for an ’80s Jackson 5 performance. (Ebony Magazine, December, 2007).
Who doesn’t remember the worldwide shock and dismay when Michael Jackson announced his retirement from music in 1990, at the age of 32? But the real shocker was what came next. Mr. Jackson’s stellar career as a film director, now nearly 20 years on, seemed pure folly at the time. What magic could such a musical being possibly work with images? Surely, a performer who spoke so eloquently with his voice and feet would, with a movie camera, be all thumbs…?
An exhibit called Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy opens today at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and runs through the end of the summer. From the Met’s website:
Fashion not only shares the superhero’s metaphoric malleability, but actually embraces and responds to the particular metaphors that the superhero represents, notably that of the power of transformation. Fashion celebrates metamorphosis, providing unlimited opportunities to remake and reshape the flesh and the self. Through fashion and the superhero, we gain the freedom to fantasize, to escape the banal, the ordinary, and the quotidian. The fashionable body and the superhero body are sites upon which we can project our fantasies, offering a virtuosic transcendence beyond the moribund and utilitarian.
I complain a lot about how the rise of the comic book blockbuster (which I’m not knocking out of hand––obviously, when they’re good they’re really, really good), has made the typical connoisseur of comic book mythology less likely to be an introspective smarty and more likely to resemble your typical aggro frat boy; like just about everything, geek culture becomes duller and less potent as it becomes more mainstream. By tying it the body/identity politics (thus adding the complications of sex) and making it completely intellectually obtuse in the process, the Met’s show takes back comic book love and restores a bit of its lost nerdiness. Sign me up!
The Met’s site has a lot of small pictures from the show and much, much more information; the above photo is excerpted from the Jaman blog.
UPDATE: There are many, many more photos from inside the exhibit on Flickr.
Yesterday, a judge threw out all charges against Steve Kurtz, the artist who had spent the past four years defending himself against false accusations of bio-terrorism, as detailed in Lynn Hershman-Leeson’s must-see hybrid doc Strange Culture. The AP has the story, via GreenCine Daily. I wrote about the film, which earned a mention on my Best of 2007 round-up, on SpoutBlog when it screened in New York last year; I originally covered the film and interviewed the director when it premiered at Sundance.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
A special round-up this afternoon, featuring bloggy memories of Manny Farber:
Yesterday, a judge threw out all charges against Steve Kurtz, the artist who had spent the past four years defending himself against false accusations of bio-terrorism, as detailed in Lynn Hershman-Leeson’s must-see hybrid doc 
