The Independentpublished some choice excerpts a couple of days ago from Notes on a Life, the recently published collected journals of Eleanor Coppola––wife of Francis Ford, mother or Roman and Sofia, and co-director of the making-of-Apocalypse Now doc, Hearts of Darkness. The book was already on my shopping list, but it’s moved up a bit in urgency now that I’ve read the excerpt about how Eleanor struggled to define herself in the mid-70s, while her husband was out winning Oscars and she was pretty much just expected to stay home with the kids.
Eleanor met artist Lynn Hershman (now Hershman-Leeson, she directed the excellent post-9/11 paranoia doc Strange Culture) through Roman’s nursery-school car pool, and the two moms became partners in conceptual art crime. Francis went out of town one weekend, and the girls threw a party where Eleanor moved her husband’s five real Oscars from a display case, and replaced them with her own five, keychain sized consolation prizes, apparently given to the wife of every Oscar winner. Then they had guests peel potatoes and, inspired by a Joseph Beuys quote, made everyoe decide whether or not their potato was art. It sounds like typical, 70s California stuff, but apparently Francis was not amused. From the book:
Oooh, this is exciting. One of my favorite films from Sundance 2007, Lynn Hershman-Leeson’s Strange Culturehas booked a two-week engagement at the Cinema Village here in New York.
Strange Culture is an experimental documentary about Steve Kurtz, an artist with the renowned Critical Art Ensemble who was arrested on fraud charges after the FBI searched his home found biological testing materials from an art installation, which they misconstrued as weapons of mass destruction. Because Kurtz is barred from speaking on camera about the details of his case, the director hired actors, including Tilda Swinton and Thomas Dean Ryan, to star in dramatizations, which are woven with testimony from Kurtz’ friends and colleagues. It’s a fairly academic approach, but the finished film is persuasive, and as a document of what happens to art in a post-terrorism climate of paranoia, it’s surprisingly moving. Check out the trailer above, and for more info on when and where Strange Culture might be playing near you, check out the film’s website.
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.
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