In the Guardian, Jonathan Jones talks with Aleksandr Sokurov about his latest film, Russian Ark, and he retraces the path of the single 96-minute Steadicam shot through the Hermitage with the museum’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky. I’ve written about this before, but what comes through here is a double view of serious passion for art.
The Hermitage dominates the lives of those who work there: It “has its own school where children can learn archaeology and art history from the age of five, preselected for curatorial lives like gymnasts or violinists.” Piotrovsky appears as himself in the film, talking with his deceased father, who was also director.
And for Sokurov, encountering art, not just seeing or presenting it, was a central goal of the film. “Sokurov films paintings from the side, in normal lighting, so that reflections – as they do – obscure one part of the picture and make the texture of its surface visible.” One encounter Sokurov provides is Rembrandt: “When you meet the real painting, you meet a real creature. Rembrandt left part of his physical being in his painting – every time you come up to a painting, you feel part of this energy, this sense of something being alive.”
Sokurov dismisses modern works—the museum’s famous Matisses don’t make the film’s, um, final cut–saying “the main criterion in art is time. It seems to me that those artists who are considered modern classics are to be tested by time yet.” And the director chides film for utterly lacking historical awareness (“due to the lack of cinema museums,” he claims) even as Jones points out the contrast of the unedited Russian Ark and its Russian Avant Garde antecedents–like Eisenstein, who also filmed in the Hermitage–whose “great modernist aesthetic” of editing became the foundation of our entire visual language.
So, Sokurov, what’s a better way to spend four hours today, watching my Criterion Collection Andrei Rublev DVD (aka, the cinema museum?) or standing in line at the Met for the last day of daVinci? “Museums make culture stable,” Sokurov notes, and they perform an invaluable conservative function, that is, conserving the “real creatures” of our collective past. As Sokurov would no doubt agree, in contemporary art, the artist leaves no part of his physical being in his work: he leaves his thoughts, his mind, his idea. And when I encounter a Felix Gonzalez-Torres light string, fabricated with parts off the hardware store shelf, I still have a sense of something being alive.
Author: greg
On Memorials Near The Pentagon
Earlier this month, the Air Force unveiled James Ingo Freed’s design for the Air Force Memorial, which will be located on a ridge overlooking the Pentagon and the Pentagon’s own recently announced September 11th Memorial. The design is inspired by fighter jet contrails, which I can’t complain about, since my disappointment with the 9/11 memorial competition drove me to a similar–but more jarring, and far less elegant–concept for the Pentagon Memorial.
What I objected to was the many designs’ near-total emphasis on the individuals who died, to the exclusion of the greater import of the event. What turned out to be the winning design, in fact, was the apotheosis of this trend; it features 184 “memorial units,” aka benches, with individually lighted reflecting pools. I blame a bathetic misreading and misapplication of Maya Lin’s minimalist memorial language. But I’ve written a lot of this before.
What’s new, though, is Bradford McKee’s piece in Slate, where he points out an other, more fundamental flaw in the Memorial plan: no one will be able to actually visit. The Pentagon’s chosen site is essentially inaccessible, for both logistical and security reasons. Oh, and it’s right next to a noisy highway.
To imagine the resulting memorial’s best case scenario, just look at the completely unvisited Navy and Marine Memorial, which is located on the Potomac in the Ladybird Johnson Memorial Park, part of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Grove, aka the landscaping along the highway.
On Providing Aid and Comfort to the Enemy
No, not Iraq, I mean one of the other hundred+ countries who aren’t “with us,” that “second largest landmass in North America,” the nation high-sticking our northern border, Canada.
I’ve fled to Canada for 1) research/groundwork for the Animated Musical, part of which is set in Montreal, 2) skiing in Mont Tremblant, a hothoused attempt to create a Quebecian Aspen or Park City, which ends up looking like Universal Studios CityWalk, 3) to get away from the incessant, empty haze of American media on the war, and 4) to hang out with my wife, who’s attending an astrophysics conference at said resort.
Here’s a status update: 1) rather than repeatedly dig their car out every morning, driveway owners in Montreal put up these temporary plastic tent garages, which look like crappy greenhouses. Also, they bilingualize everything, even things that shouldn’t be translated, like steak au poivre and croissant. That’s all I can reveal at this point. 2) It’s raining at Tremblant, so skiing is losing out to weblogging in a room full of telnetting physicists. 3) Canadian media, or the CBC, at least, is comparing the breach with the US over Iraq to the whole softwood export turmoil. Yep, coming to Canada’s certainly put the war in perspective for me. 4) well, one outta four ain’t bad.
(VIA CEL) if u think u cn
skip church & beat the line 4 the davinci sho, 4get it. Godll cu & put 5k old ppl (who only sleep 4hrs/nt) in line ahed of u
On The Subway: History Of The Peloponnesian War
Since I read a WWII novel in the buildup to GWII (If you can boil Gravity’s Rainbow down to a WWII novel), I thought I’d better go back to the Mother of All War Stories, another book you pretend to have finished in college, Thucydides’ History of The Peloponnesian War.
Considered the first clear attempt at fact- not myth-based history, HOTPW puts paid to the idea that there’s anything new in the art or business of war. I’m only about a quarter of the way in, still in the escalation to war between Sparta and Athens, the alliance and superpower, respectively, of their day, and page after page have played out in the news.
Some things change forever, but some things are painfully the same, no matter what you hear.
On TV: IFP Independent Spirit Awards
Eh. Who needs to watch the Oscars, with their self-serious, press conference-addicted producer, Gil Cates, and their Chicago faits accomplis. The IFP Spirit Awards are like a hundred times better. It’s on Bravo right now (and it repeats, uncensored, on IFC, again and again). Some highlights:
If Stylists Ruled The World
As in matters of war, the British press is out-reporting the US on the impending Oscar crisis. See, for example, this Observer article, “Glitz out as stars ponder Oscar protest.”
“A determination to ‘down-gown’, that is, to exchange frivolous glitz with muted glamour, has been announced as the tactic of choice by celebrities keen to demonstrate their sensitivity and political awareness but unwilling to boycott the ceremony altogether.” [italics added for shock and awe, -g]
“Ben Affleck is among those who has apparently not yet made up his mind [about wearing an anti-war totem of some kind] . Instead he has announced that the final decision will rest with his stylist.”
Just as peace descended on the ghetto, albeit briefly, when breakdancing supplanted gang warfare, maybe what our war-torn world needs most right now is a serious political and military down-gowning. I never thought I’d say this, but: Phillip Bloch, put down that breast petal; it’s time for you to save the world.
On Opera Adapted From Novel
I became familiar with Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, through its horrible film adaptation, a numbingly unsubtle reproductive fascist farce. I guess in 1990, the only totalitarianism that director Volker Schlondorff could get people to accept is the East German kind.
Anyway, on the occasion of its premiere at the English National Opera, Atwood writes in the Guardian about allowing the Danish composer Poul Ruders to make an opera of it in the first place. One challenge turned out to be the lack of contractual precedent for adapting an opera from a living writer’s work.
Then there was the Danish and/or lawyerly cast of mind, an introspective one given to second thoughts, as in Hamlet. (“Whether ’tis prudenter in the contract to offer/ The perks and carrots of outrageous royalties/ Or to strike pen throughout a sea of clauses/ And screw the writer blind?”) But with the help of various agents we managed to cobble something together. I forget who got the T-shirt rights, but it wasn’t me.
That was 2000, and Atwood’s world–a fundamentalist takeover of the US government, a rollback of civil liberties, secret police with the all-seeing eye for a logo controlling the population through credit card surveillance–seemed like a liberal campfire story, best told with a flashlight under your chin. The Danes loved it, though. So did Time, which compared it to the Taliban. You may have to travel to the UK for this one; I don’t imagine it opening in the US for 2 or 6 years.
One upside: at least now we know it doesn’t look like East Germany.
On Art On My Mind
Generally avoiding television “coverage” of the war, but some images inevitably bleed in. Here is some art that’s been on my mind as a result. [Also, gmtPlus9 went black in Japan and posted some war-related art. Thanks, Travelers Diagram.]
Blast, from a series of photographs
by Naoya Hatakeyama, image: LA Galerie
Nacht 1, II by Thomas Ruff, who began using nightvision after
the technology was popularized in Gulf War I (GWI), image: ZKM.de
Olivier Silva, Foreign Legion 2000-2002, ongoing, by Rineke Dijkstra,
who is photographing one man through his term of
service in the French Foreign Legion. images: Galerie Jan Mot
Hmm. JP, DE, FR, NL. I just noticed these are all from countries who know war firsthand, on their own soil.
Domo Arigato, Excite Roboto
I’ve never mentioned it, but a couple of people asked, and it seems to be mildly popular, or at least amusing: I’m trying out the Japanese translator link at the top of the page. It’s a handmade URL that runs the greg.org front page through Excite Japan’s site translator. The output’s fairly accurate. Japanese will happily adopt a foreign word rather than use an awkward translation; Excite leaves some things as is, avoiding some Babelfish-style gaffes.
Of course, making translation available and building up a Japanese audience are two separate things. [Thanks to Jason for the heddo appu.]
Welcome to the Bloghdad Cafe
Forget 1991, it feels like 1999 around here. That was the last time I made an impulse buy. of a URL.
If anyone has a good idea for what to do with Bloghdad.com, let me know. The clock is ticking.
Some things I’m not considering:
Hmm. But is there anything else?
A Long NYT Article On The Road To Chicago
Rick Lyman writes about the decades-long battles to make a film version of Chicago, including a Chandler Auditorium-ful of cast, director, and writers who were attached to the project through the years. One star is conspicuously absent from the scrum, Bebe Neuwirth, whose Broadway Chicago won her a Tony and transformed the property from a “half-remembered musical from the 1970’s [into] a fresh hit.” Yet somehow, casting “Catherine Zeta-Jones was an easy choice, with her musical comedy experience.”
Lyman leaves more such hints at the bitchy article that could have been, except that “upbeat amnesia” reigns among the “formerly fractious creative team,” the Neuralizer-like effect of a dozen glinting Oscar statuettes (and Harvey “the Hutt” Weinstein’s Academy-muscling for all the film’s nominations).
Well, almost all. Apparently director Rob Marshall’s not feeling the love. He thinks Miramax is not only not doing enough to promote him for Best Director, Harvey’s thrown his full weight behind Marshall’s competition, some flash-in-the-pan named Martin Scorsese. Miramax had Robert Wise “write”* a recommendation for Scorsese and his little film, Gangs of New York, but for Marshall, “to have Mr. Wise, the director of The Sound of Music, [and West Side Story and, oddly, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, – g.] come out in favor of the Gangs director was apparently the final straw.”
I threw together a quick PowerPoint slide on why, seriously, Marshall should be happy to be nominated:
* Wise, a former president of the Academy, found Harvey’d pulled him into a controversy.”His” essay pushing Scorsese for the Oscar was actually written by a Miramax publicist. The company had run the whole thing as an ad in Variety and other papers. Previously, the LA Times‘ John Horn busted Sony for inventing reviews from an imaginary critic. Someone embed that man!
On Building Dramatic Tension
On Poynter.org, Roy Peter Clark (if you lived in Hee-Haw country, you’d use your middle name, too) writes about the war networks’ using “one of the oldest and most powerful narrative devices ever conceived,” the countdown clock.
Have cable news graphics always looked
like movie posters? image:filmsite.org
Clark points out that movies are frequently structured around the ticking clock: “from the Wicked Witch’s inverted hourglass to the 007 nuclear bomb timer at the end of Goldfinger (um, and every other Bond film?)… the Fox drama 24 Hours,” and his childhood favorite, High Noon.
Jon Stewart also had a hi-larious piece about these clocks last night on TDS.
Update: On that note, here’s how classics professor/kingmaker Donald Kagan–who headed the Project for the New American Century, the roadmap to Pax Americana we’ve been set upon, whether we know it or not–envisions the US in the 21st century: “You saw the movie High Noon? he asks. “We’re Gary Cooper.”
Hmm. If this Bush Doctrine (as it’s now called) isn’t repudiated, it’ll be more like High Noon meets Groundhog Day.
When In The Course Of Human Events…
In this interlude before war, the US administration and its pundits are trying to sound reluctant, entirely forced into war by either evil Iraq or feckless France. This war, we are told, results from “failed diplomacy.” Bush supporters are rewriting November, pointing to signs–apparently apparent only after diplomacy’s declared dead–that France (and others) were duplicitous, diploming in bad faith, all the while set on derailing Bush’s war. Bush critics, on the other hand, place the blame squarely on the administration, decrying its diplomatic missteps, mistakes, blunders, post-9/11 hubristic bumbling, and/or lack of international awareness.
Does this miss the point, though? Isn’t it possible, likely, blindingly obvious, even, that what Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld want is to dissolve political bands? To create a US, free and unencumbered by multinational/international restrictions, obligations, responsibilities, and alliances, at least those the US isn’t able to control? viz. Kyoto. ABM Treaty. ICC, Geneva Convention. Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. NATO. UN. a Gulf War-size coalition. Are “failed” diplomacy, “doomed” inspections, a diminished UN (either fallen in line or declared irrelevant) actually strategic objectives of this administration?
Could this administration be consciously pursuing a strategy of disengagement from a multilateral world is considers an anachronism? Of setting out to reconfigure the world–in ways that even our “allies” may find painful, but too bad–to reflect their view of the US’ Unique Status, whether that unique status is derived from Providential annointing, a $400bn/year military, or some rationalized confluence of the two? The US stands, unparalleled, above the rest of the world, and the world must acknowledge it and adapt.
Of course, there was once a time when the US could claim its unique status derived from its ideas, from its founding principles. Advice to those who stopped at “dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another”: KEEP READING.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal (not American and Other)…
Malcolm Bruce, said the same thing about the Bush strategy: “This division may be exactly the outcome the Bush administration wanted” Listen to the NPR report from 03/18/03 while you can.]
On The French And WWII (and WWI)
When Maciej started French Week (“fighting francophobia since wednesday”), Jason linked to the first installment, “Ten Reasons to Love France,” which was a breezy response to the frivolous tone of the fries/toast/kiss gag.
It’s not funny anymore. From day two, “WWII, the Real Story”
…But there’s a more profound, indirect reason for the French defeat [in 1940], which explains why the German armies were able to score this tactical coup in the first place. And that reason is the French experience in World War I.
World War I has almost comical connotations in our own popular culture. American doughboys, kaisers and marshals in funny hats, the Red Baron. But for France, the Great War was the most traumatic event of the twentieth century. No country lost as great a proportion of its population in that war: 1,400,000 men were killed outright, two million were wounded. A million of the wounded had debilitating injuries, and could never work again. They were a lost generation, and a living reminder to others of what war really meant.