Get this man a graphic designer. The LMDC has released scanned images of all 5,201 Memorial Competition submissions, browsable by country and state, or searchable by last name.
Mark Wahlberg‘s proposal is here, and here is Ross Bleckner‘s. John Bennett‘s and Paul Myoda‘s separate proposals (they did the Tribute in Light). Mark Dion, Brian Tolle (he did the Irish Hunger Memorial in BPC).
Here’s Antoine Predock, Arquitectonica. Peter Walker (who got it anyway, just not with this proposal). Marc Quinn (whose show just closed at Mary Boone, and the last Englishman to hear of Olafur Eliasson).
Here are proposals by Valerie Atkisson, Kara Hammond, and Jeff Jarvis, original members of our competition charette last June. I’ll be surfing for a while, it seems.
[update: In Friday’s NYT, David Dunlap talks to jurors about revealing all the submissions.]
Author: greg
Antonioni’s Blow-Up now on DVD
It was just released today. Buy it or rent it now. There’s a commentary track by Antonioni scholar Peter Brunette, (author of The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni), but read J. Hoberman’s excellent contextual discussion of Blow-up in his latest book, The Dream Life instead.
New Yorker Stalking: Hilton Als’ Slate Diary
New Yorker staff writer Hilton Als is doing the diary at Slate this week. So far it’s mostly a New-York-is-Hollywood fabulous account of his screenwriting projects, with a little a lot of stroking. On Monday, while despairing reading Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures, Als laments, “I feel as if I’ve lived through the Miramax years without ever taking a meeting with Harvey.” But by today, he’s gushing about dinner with Tilda Swinton at Odeon. (Hilton! You’re still livin’em, honey!)
Related: Passerby has started showing films by Derek Jarman (an early Swinton collaborator) on Monday nights at 9PM. Screenings in March and April may include appearances by other Jarmanites, so stay tuned for details.
Weird triangulation: the bartender/partner once wrote a Slate journal about a “Mormon art collector’s wedding party” at Passerby.
On a Soundtrack for the Street
Warren St. John wrote with some air of complaint about oblivious iPodders who clog our streets and queues while lost in their own musical worlds. This may be annoying, true, but it’s much better than the opposite situation: music that is piped into the street by retailers and/or Real Estate Experience developers. It’s particularly bad on faux-urban streetscapes, like the Market Commons at Clarendon, a “retail mecca” just outside DC. Nestled among the landscaped bushes are little mushroom-shaped speakers that pump out a chain-store-friendly soundtrack all day and night. It’s freakin’ annoying.
Our (Film) Town, or Pale-Cheeked Pinkos
Don’t know how I missed this. The Guardian/Observer‘s Damon Wise goes on a revealing to Filmbyen, or Film Town, a Danish hive of suburban movie production, founded by Lars Von Trier and his producing partner, Peter “The Eel” Jensen. (That nickname’ll be TMI in a minute, by the way.) Dogme95 co-conspirator Thomas Vinterberg has also set up shop in “town.”
At the agressively but unsurprisingly unconventional Filmbyen, VT and The Eel insist on various musical and flag-raising rituals and on keeping alive whatever of their communist ideals they can. We’re talking actual, card-carrying communists here, not Fox News slash-and-burn invective-style communists.
And on public nudity. Wise has a hard time maintaining eye contact: “Like ourselves and the rest of the pool’s other patrons Vinterberg is wearing a swimming costume, but Jensen and Von Trier just whip off their clothes and dive in. Jensen’s genitalia are on full display and we escape with just a glimpse of Von Trier’s pallid bottom.” What follows is a discussion Von Trier’s long, hard, sweaty…process of writing, working with actors, and making his latest film, Dogville.
[Dogville opened this weekend in London (and which comes to the US in early April). See Philip French’s dazed Observer review, or the official Dogville UK site.]
While I have nothing to add about communist genitalia, I have seen Dogville and will write about it soon.
Umbrellas of Cherbourg at Film Forum
Ever since 1992, when I stumbled, completely ignorant and unprepared, into a screening of the restored version introduced by Agnes Varda (“she does documentaries or something, right?” was all I had in my head), I’ve been transfixed and fascinated by The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
It’s an unabashed-yet-triste story of young love, set in a color-saturated fantasy French town, about a girl left pregnant and alone when her mechanic boyfriend gets shipped off to the war in Algeria. And the whole thing is sung, to music by Michel Legrand. Cherbourg made Catherine Deneuve a star, even though her voice was dubbed. What the hell is this thing? I still don’t know, but I love it.
Go to Film Forum by Thursday to find out. Zeitgeist Films has struck a new 35mm print for the movie’s 40th anniversary. You could buy the old DVD, or wait until April for a new release, but seriously, go see it in the theater. Read Jessica Winter’s tribute to the film.
General Washington and the Trenton of Doom
In the NYTimes Book Review, historian/storyteller Joseph Ellis delivers a gushing review of “Washington’s Crossing,” David Hackett Fischer’s “truly riveting” book-length repositioning of the American rebel army crossing the Delaware and defeating Hessians at Trenton as a turning point in the War of Independence.
Hey, I give it points for being the first book in ten years not to have a paragraph-long subtitle that tries to sound like a movie pitch. And what is Ellis’s highest praise?
For reasons beyond my comprehension, there has never been a great film about the War of Independence. The Civil War, World War I, World War II and Vietnam have all been captured memorably, but the American Revolution seems to resist cinematic treatment. More than any other book, ”Washington’s Crossing” provides the opportunity to correct this strange oversight, for in a confined chronological space we have the makings of both Patton and Saving Private Ryan‘ starring none other than George Washington. Fischer has provided the script. And it’s all true.
Of course, Fischer–and Ellis, whose credit line says is working on a biography of Washington–are two years too late, and they both must know it. In 2002, the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, responding to the absence of a great film starring Washington, aka “the action hero of his time,” hired Steven Spielberg to produce a 15-minute film for an $85 million interactive museum program being built next to GW’s house. ” As Jim Rees, director of Mount Vernon told the Washington Post, “If it was as exciting and action-packed as Indiana Jones we would be thrilled.”
Shoppertainment links:
Buy Washington’s Crossing before they put out the movie tie-in edition, with Mel Gibson as Washington.
Oh, wait. They already made that movie.
Then buy Band of Brothers(a Spielberg joint), and imagine Bastogne as Trenton, which it probably is. The Trenton of Belgium, anyway.
[update: for those who lack the patriotism to invest $89.99 for the BoB DVD, you can also rent it. Except that GreenCine doesn’t ship to Canada. Pinko.]
WBWJU?
What battery would Jesus use? Interstate, of course. It looks like even George Bush’s favorite philosopher is trying to reach the elusive NASCAR Dad this year.
James Caviezel, who plays the Gibsonian version of Jesus Christ, broke The Master’s injunction about keeping the Sabbath Day holy by flacking unto the NASCAR masses for The Passion It was more Event in The Press Tent than Sermon on The Mount; there was a The Passion baseball cap where a crown of thorns should be.
The real miracle of Daytona Sunday, though, comes from the Good Book of indie film marketing: Gibson rendered some serious Caesars unto Bobby Labonte’s Interstate Battery team and got The Passion logo on the hood of his Chevy.
Sforzian Background of The Century of The Week
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.
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.
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
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, 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.
New York Film Festival(s)
[via Gawker] Manhattan User’s Guide has compiled a list of film festivals in New York. At last count, there are 28, including six at Lincoln Center and four at Anthology. Start dubbing those screener tapes.
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
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?