Author: greg

Sforzian Background of The Century of The Week

Hong Kong? or Daytona? AF1 taking off on the occasion of some sporting event or another. image: AP via yahoo.com

It’s not political theater, even political amphitheater. It’s beyond political grandstanding, even though there are grandstands in the picture. It’s the political imagemaking equivalent of the chariot race in Ben Hur: Air Force One taking off next to Daytona International Speedway during the Daytona 500.
Sforza knows how to set up the camera positions for the best shot, image: Reuters via yahoo.com

And it was purely for show; GWB had already run a partial lap around the track in his motorcade before turning the gaggle of NASCAR drivers into colorful extras for his own photo op. [The composition is similar to the Thanksgiving turkey shoot in Iraq, where a 3-D environment wraps around Bush, as opposed to the less sophisticated made-from-people backdrop.] I can’t wait for a similar shot from the Republican Convention, with corporate sponsors swarming around Bush in a visual cacophany of be-logoed gear.
Whatever your leanings, you have to be daft, numb and blind to not appreciate the near-sublime stagecraft of White House Productions’ Scott Sforza. [via NYT’s David Sanger]
Update [via Slate’s Bryan Curtis]: in 1969 Nixon tried to pull the same sports photo op to appeal to the same demographic by choppering into the Texas-Arkansas football game. The resulting photos are positively primitive compared to Sforza’s handiwork. No DW Griffith, but it got the criticism-deflecting job done.

On Finishing a Film Without the Director

After British director James Miller was killed–shot in the neck by an Israeli army sniper in Gaza in May 2003–while filming an HBO documentary, his wife Sophy, field producer Dan Edge and other crew members felt compelled to complete the movie. Her story is in the Telegraph, and Edge writes in the Guardian about making the film–and watching Miller get shot in front of him.

a sketch of the location where director James Miller was shot by Israeli soldiers on 2 May 2003, image: justice4jamesmiller.com

The finished documentary, Death in Gaza, is a fly-on-the-wall account of a young Palestinian boy and his interactions with paramilitaries barely older than himself. The film also includes extended footage of Miller and his translator being shot as they approached an Israeli APC, while shouting “British journalist!” and waving a white flag. Sketches made during an independent investigation bear an eerie resemblance to camera setup diagrams used on the set.
To date, no one has been held accountable for Miller’s death.
The film screened last week as part of the the Berlinale’s Panorama Dokumente.
Related: An account of Miller’s death and an open letter to the Israeli Defense Forces from the Committee to Protect Journalists.
justice4jamesmiller.com, a site set up by his family and friends, which contains the results of an investigation by Chiron Resources, a company which specializes in media support in hostile environments.
Related but lighter: background on the Panorama Dokumente, from Filmmaker Magazine’s blog
David Hudson’s and Cory Vielma’s exhaustive-but-insightful daily coverage from the Berlin Festival, at GreenCine. It’s the next best thing to being there.

The Quilts of Gee’s Bend of the Corcoran

Jessie Pettway's 1950's quilt, image: corcoran.org

One of the most rewarding shows last year in New York was The Quilts of Gee’s Bend at the Whitney. For generations, the descendants of former slaves in an isolated Alabama town developed quilt designs that stand alongside–and frequently prefigure by decades–some of the best modern art of the 20th century. The reminded me of Stuart Davis, 80’s Sol Lewitt, and most of all, Ellsworth Kelly.
Anyway, as of yesterday, that show is at the Corcoran in DC. I understand if you’re still boycotting because of that embarassing Seward Johnson exhibit, but you’ll only be hurting yourself if you miss this. But if you insist, you can approximate the Gee’s Bend experience by buying the catalog and the more expansive Gee’s Bend: The Women and their Quilts, or with a handtufted, quilt-patterned carpet, made under exclusive license by the Classic Rug Collection.
Over 600 quilts are now owned by the non-profit Tinwood Alliance, which was established by Peter Arnett, an Atlanta collector who began amassing them in the 1980’s.

writing about dibujar

El Greco, some painting of a cardinal I see all the time at The Met, image:guardian.co.uk
El Greco, from The Met, via the Guardian’s online gallery

“Dibujar e mas dibujar (draw and draw some more).” That’s El Greco citing Michelangelo about the importance of drawing. The Guardian’s James Fenton mentions it in his backstage report at the National Gallery’s El Greco exhibition, which opened this week. Fenton muses on drawing’s ephemerality while watching curators uncrate works for the show. In the process, the curators have to hold him back from drooling half the world’s El Greco drawings right out of existence.
Also open in London: a sturdier Donald Judd retrospective at the Tate Modern [review], which is up alongside Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project until mid-March. Road trip!
Related:
Adrian Searle’s El Greco review: “the power of a hand grenade”
Eliasson’s Weather Project in (my) photos from the opening, before the first million people saw it.

On “Trolling for Trash”

Scott McClellan may have been more right than he knew yesterday. From the Washington Post:

The White House has been unable to produce peers from Bush’s service in Alabama. But Bill Burkett, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Texas National Guard, said in an interview with The Washington Post this week that he overheard a speakerphone call about Bush’s National Guard file in 1997, when Bush was Texas governor. Burkett said he was in a National Guard office when he overheard Joseph M. Allbaugh, then Bush’s chief of staff, tell an officer in reference to Bush’s military file that he “needed to make sure there was nothing to embarrass the governor.”
Burkett said he later witnessed some items from Bush’s file in the trash. [Emphasis mine, for now]

Calpundit has a lengthy transcript of an interview with Burkett, and corroborating comments from Burkett contemporaries in the Guard.
The domain name, trollingfortrash.com, was registered yesterday. I always thought “trawling for trash” was more correct, but I’m happy to wait a few months for Bill Safire’s column.

On Needing to Come Clean

Colin Farrell as Roland Bozz in Tigerland, image:tigerlandmovie.com

Apparently George Bush’s isn’t the only record being cleansed. Tell me if this story sounds familiar: after transferring to a southern backwater army base at the senseless height of the war, a charismatic Texan bad boy does everything he can to not get shipped off to Vietnam. I know what you’re thinking, but no. It’s from Colin Farrell’s first starring role, a little film called Tigerland.
The Tigerland script came from a couple of first-time writers, and premiered at the 2000 Toronto Film Festival. Shot in a mere 28 days with a handheld 16mm camera, for less than $10 million, Tigerland apparently has a gritty yet unassuming documentary-style feeling of authenticity. On the official website, the director cited both “Danish director Lars von Trier’s Dogma 95 [sic] movement” and Frederic Wiseman’s Titicut Follies as inspiration. Pretty good indie cred so far.
Reviews praised the solid, even powerful, performances, as well as the visceral camerawork of Matthew Labatique (Pi, Requiem for a Dream), and Rotten Tomatoes’ rating is a respectable 71%. Yet distribution for the film was so feeble (5 screens in NY/LA, 2 weeks, $140K US B.O.), reviewers as late as last spring were describing the film as “still unreleased.” [Details are on IMDb, it’s available on DVD, and you can rent it. Maybe they’re lazy reporters.]
Just another worthy indie that unfortunately failed to find an audience, you say? Maybe, except that the distributor who buried it in October 2000–during the height of the presidential election, mind you–was Rupert Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox. And the director? Joel Schumacher.
Now here’s a real scandal that demands immediate investigation: 1) Are these really the same people who made Phone Booth, and 2) did Joel Schumacher really make a decent movie?

“[Strauss] recently signed with William Morris for feature film and television representation.”

[via Gothamist] The Style Section article a few weeks ago where Neil Strauss plays wingman to some David Blaine wannabe named Mystery (Seriously. You think the Times didn’t factcheck something so goofy?) has been optioned by Columbia Pictures (along with a book based on the piece). The price? “In the low six figures.” Strauss will advise, but not adapt.

K Street: Who’s Acting Now?

Cheneyac Mary Matalin under oath in the Plame investigation, image: washingtonpost.com

For the ever-popular Law & Order, the producers mine today’s headlines for new story ideas. HBO’s K Street is just the opposite. Not in the “what, it blew and nobody watched it?” way you’re thinking, in the “life imitates art” way.
In one K Street plotline, the actress and former Cheneyac Mary Matalin worried about being investigated by the Feds for leaking a CIA operative’s identity. At the time, the subject was innocuous or implausible enough to pass the “no substance” filter that actual DC operatives ran their cameo appearances through. But last month, the Washington Post reports, Matalin and several other White House appointees were hauled before a grand jury to testify about who in the administration leaked a CIA operative’s identity. She even wore the same “passes for fashion in Washington” jacket for both gigs. (Hey Mary, I know the IRS now works for you now, but I hope you got a receipt for that thing. Not that HBO wants it back…)
How to tell the truth from the fiction, then? Easy. On K Street, Matalin’s lament rambled on (and on and on) over several episodes. In The Real World, her only line was, “I can’t comment.”

Anne Truitt Week

Since moving Modern Art Notes to Arts Journal, Tyler Green’s been demonstrating his critic-as-advocate chops, sometimes with a degree of acid that’d make even professional bee-atch Charlie Finch blush. He makes nice nice this week, though, by publishing brief excerpts daily from Anne Truitt’s Daybook. On top of simultaneously being a pioneer and stalwart contrarian of Minimalism, Truitt’s published journals are an unsurpassed window into the artistic process. Only Daybook is in print, but you can get the other volumes from ABEbooks.
Related: Truitt and Agnes Martin showing across the street from each other in Jan. 2003.
12/04 update: Mourning the loss of Anne Truitt.

19th Century War Reports from Harper’s

Since relaunching their website, Harper’s has been posting selections from their 140+year archive. For example, “Battle Gossip,” an 1861 column by Charles Nordhoff. In addition to vivid accounts of women in combat, Nordhoff writes about Napoleon III’s use of balloons for battlefield surveillance; correspondence with the enemy; and animals in war:

There are many instances of worn-out cavalry horses, sold out of the army and used in menial employments, remembering and obeying, years after, the sound of a regimental trumpet. At the battle of Waterloo some of the horses, as they lay on the ground, having recovered from the first agony of their wounds, commenced eating the grass about them, thus surrounding themselves with a circle of bare ground, the limited extent of which showed their weakness; others were noticed quietly grazing in the middle of the field, between the two hostile lines, their riders having been shot off their backs.

I Heart The Time Warner Mall

If you need me, I’ll be at the Time Warner Mall, getting in line for the escalator to Whole Foods, where I’ll be bellying up to New York’s only Jamba Juice.
“Whata Juice?” you say? Soon enough, you will be surrounded by seemingly rational people discussing the merits of Power-sized Bounce Back Blasts with Vita Boost. You can join in, or you can take your mall-snobbery and chain store disdain, grind it into a powder, dump it into your (Stick-in-the) Mud Truck coffee, plant your crabby ass on the IND, and slink home to watch Channel J.
Related:
“This is like a piece of Stamford in Midtown…It’s really nice that they brought the suburbs into the city.” [NYT]
Lockhart Steele, too, drinks the Kool-aid Jamba Juice
Felix Salmon worries rightly that this mall foretells the coming of a WTC Mall
Related to that:
“when they came for my greek-lookin’ coffee cups, I said nothing” [greg.org 7/02]

Come Unto “JESUS” (and Bring Me Some Milk Duds)

Jesus the Movie, in Africa, image:jesusfilm.orgIf the story in Mel Gibson’s The Passion sounds vaguely familiar, you won’t be surprised by the revelations in Franklin Foer’s article in the Times today. It apparently comes from a 1979 Warner Bros. movie called Jesus. [o Hollywood, remakes are like manna from heaven.] “JESUS” (the movie) has developed something of a cult following [sic].
Thanks to 300 earnest evangelicals at the Jesus Film Project who have translated it into 848 languages, and thousands of projector-and-generator-toting missionary/exhibitors who circle the globe, “JESUS” has become the centerpiece of a Rocky Horror Picture Show-style filmic conversion experience, albeit one where bread and wine replaces flying toast.
The distributor and original producer, Campus Crusade for Christ, claims that over 3 billion people have seen the movie. For those living in remote Andean and African villages, it was often the first film they’d ever seen. Foer points to Bro. Brian Helstrom’s unsubtly symbolic story of a screening in South Africa:

“‘You could see them physically jump back at the sight of the serpent tempting Jesus,’ he recalled. ‘When soldiers whip Jesus, you could hear grown adults crying.’ After Jesus’s death, but before his resurrection, a black South African missionary told the crowd that they had a chance to pray and to accept Christ. ‘He asked everybody who prayed to walk forward and come into light,’ Mr. Helstrom says. ‘One hundred forty-five people walked out of the darkness into light.'”

And within months, missionaries from the Church of Loew’s set up the bush country’s first multiplex, making it possible for Charlie’s Angels II: Full Throttle to be screened 35 times a day. Hallelujah.
I’m somewhere between troubled and pissed that film experience is so uncritically substituted for (or equated with) religious experience. There’s some serious bill of goods-selling going on here. When I was a missionary (for another demonination) in Japan, I ran across people whose names were on the Church baptism rolls but who had no interest in being Christian at all, any more than eating at a Mongolian BBQ would make them want to be Mongolian. Turns out that ten years earlier, some missionaries with more zeal than sense decided to overcome Japanese teenagers’ general religious apathy by starting a baseball league. After a season or two, they’d help out their cool American friends and climb into that pool there, and…well, what are friends for? Conversion may be embracing and emotionally powerful, but friendship ain’t religion, and neither is a tear-jerking movie.
I wonder, what does the Bible teach us on this subject? There’s the “render unto Caesar those things which are Caesar’s” thing, which should put the kibbosh on selling cheap, emotionally manipulative cinematic hat tricks based on techonological superiority as salvation. [Unrelated: I can totally picture Mel having a “render unto Caesar his points against the gross” clause in his distribution contract, btw.] But I have another verse in mind: “By their fruits ye shall know them,” or as they say in the picture business, “what else has he done?”
Jesus, it turns out, was an adaptation, or as its opening credits describe it, a “documentary taken entirely from the Gospel of Luke.” But Luke lost his story credit [Luke, baby, you need new representation. C-A-L-L M-E. -ed.] to Barnet Bain, who has gone on to produce such dubious religious schlock as The Apocalypse (starring Sandra Bernhard??) and the eternally punishing Robin Williams CG-hellfest, What Dreams May Come. Decidedly not funny.
Co-director Peter Sykes has even more to answer for at judgment day (not to be confused with T2: Judgment Day, which rocks. Somebody say amen!). Before turning to Jesus (The Movie) Sykes made, um, let me get this straight: Tell Me Lies, Demons of the Mind, and, um, Child of Satan. I mean, I know the well need no physician, but what in hell [sic] was the Campus Crusader behind the project thinking to hire this guy? And where exactly did they meet?
So Campus Crusade is the world’s biggest film distributor, the unsung McDonald’s of global evangelism–with over 3 billion saved–and Mel’s set to open his Passion on 2,500 screens. Whatever. As The Man Himself (verily) says (un)to us, “they have their reward.”