the making of, by greg allen
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.]
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.
Decasia is Bill Morrison’s fascinating, expressive film composed of beautifully deteriorated nitrate film stock. Last December, Laurence Wechsler wrote about showing it to Errol Morris: “I popped the video into his VCR and proceeded to observe as Morrison’s film once again began casting its spell. Errol sat drop-jawed: at one point, about halfway through, he stammered, ‘This may be the greatest movie ever made.”’
Morrison will be at some Anthology Film Archive screenings. The film’s website has a growing schedule of other screenings, including 26 March at Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum. Read J. Hoberman’s Voice review. Also, buy Decasia on VHS.
Meanwhile, in his short review, the Voice‘s Dennis Lim guts the Oscar-nominated short films like a Hebrew-speaking carp. Lim’s joyless Oscar prediction: “Inja, a pat anti-apartheid parable manipulative enough to enlist a dog and a child.” Yikes. What’s the endgame for making shorts again??
For the diehard greg.org fan, who’s not related to me and/or not chased away by my recent forays into my perspective on current events which keep relating back to the themes of my first movie, otherwise I’d have just started a 9/11 blog and turned it into a warblog and… ahem:
I’ve been writing the press kit for Souvenir (January 2003), my second short, which has been holding in a sort of DV-to-film transfer limbo. Also, I started dubbing a bunch of screener tapes, because there’s a world of film festivals out there waiting for a reflective look at ironing.
ANNALS OF NATIONAL SECURITY/Seymour M. Hersh/ LUNCH WITH THE CHAIRMAN/ Why was Richard Perle meeting with Adnan Khashoggi?
[just found this on Google, and thought I’d add it to the NYMDb. Normally, I set the post date so the links appear in chronological order, but since this story is so timely, I’ll leave it on top for a few days. – greg]
Related:
Under Attack, Director Says Hollinger’s Black Misled Him [NYT]
OK, before I talk about how seeing The Cremaster Cycle straight through changed my understanding of Matthew Barney’s work, let me get a couple of things out of the way:
1) FLW didn’t design those theater chairs to be sat in at all, much less for eight hours in one day Aggressive, non-user-centered architecture should be taken out and shot.
2) Best overheard comment after Cremaster 1, when a guy at a suddenly partially visible urinal complained that the mens room door was being propped open by the line: “We just spent 45 minutes in someone’s ovaries. I’m sure no one cares about seeing you take a piss.”
3) I don’t know what country you’re from, and frankly, I don’t care. On this island, we keep our hands off the freakin’ art, especially when there are signs and guards at every piece. And if you pull the dumb foreigner shtick every time a guard tells you not to touch something, I’ll bust you again.
3.1) I swear, between this show and the MoMA QNS opening, I may never loan anything I own to a museum again.
3.2) What really makes me mad, is that now I’m all jingoistic, when I should just be anti-B&T. Oy, the world we live in…
Net net: Matthew Barney’s films are worth seeing, again, and in order. They’re the strongest expression of what he’s doing. He may call himself a sculptor, but that’s just a numbers game. He clearly exerts phenomenal time/effort/thought on materials, objects and spaces; but the experience of his sculptures pales to that of the films (and the experience of sculpture-in-film). Likewise, his drawings–which are small, precious, slight, almost invisible–get subsumed by their giant sculpted vitrines.
An extremely useful/interesting educational aid is The Gospel Cremaster Cycle (According to Neville Wakefield), an exhaustive catalog/glossary which functions like an encyclopedia of Barney’s universe. It weighs like a hundred pounds, though, so plan be home when it ships; you don’t want to carry it back from the post office (or the Guggenheim, for that matter).
There are a few exceptions: I found the flags and banners interesting, and some metal objects (e.g., the Masonic tools from C3) are exquisite. The mirrored saddle is in a class by itself (yeah, there are at least two, but only one’s on exhibit). [An art market side note: I don’t know, but a significant number of the C3 work is large, institution-sized, and all “courtesy Barbara Gladstone Gallery,” almost as if it’s a showroom for out-of-town curators. All that’s missing is a “to the trade only” sign in the window.]
As for the photographs, which I’d liked best going in, most feel inexplicably lifeless compared to the films they came from. Barney can create absolutely stunning images, but they’re on film, where stunning often morphs into mesmerizing. It’s telling that while the photos reproduce very well, I could only find one image of a Barney vitrine online–from an auction report; even though they’re display cases, these non-filmic sculptures seem innoculated against reproduction.
The films hold up very well, but as film-as-art, not art-as-film. Consecutive viewing (as opposed to the in order they were made) strengthens both their thematic/narrative and their visual impact. I was surprised to realize how many elements are from Barney’s own life/world/story; it was unexpectedly personal, as opposed to issue/metaphor-driven.
In his review, J. Hoberman says that the press screenings for the whole Cycle were sparsely attended; he (like everyone else, he concludes) prefers the ambient, less demanding mode of watching a few minutes on the gallery flatscreens. “One scarcely staggers from this six-and-a-half-hour magnum opus inclined to proclaim the second coming of David Lynch�or even Julian Schnabel,” he writes, in full “when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail” mode.
Which makes Barney’s claim to be a sculptor, not a filmmaker, relevant. He’s asserting his identity as an artist. Cremaster 2, which Hoberman slammed the hardest as a film, is one of the most haunting and beautiful works of art I’ve seen. Jeremy Blake told me Paul Thomas Anderson had asked him, “Man, why do artists have their heads so far up their asses sometimes?” “They like the smell,” Jeremy deadpanned. “But seriously, it’s introspection. Contemplation. You should try it sometime.”
In my budding filmmaker mode, I had had some of the same complaints as Hoberman (ie., simplistic camera angles, AWOL editing), but his glib dismissal of Cremaster says more about the diminished expectations and limits of film. Sure, movie directors think they’re God, and Barney’s conjured up a complete, system of symbols and myths that’d make the Catholic Church proud. Whether that means he thinks he’s God, Jesus, or the Pope, I can’t say, but at least he isn’t the second coming of Julian Schnabel.
I’m watching the entire Cremaster Cycle today, a Friday feature of the Guggenheim show. In the mean time, Matthew Barney’s site, Cremaster.net, is up and running. Check out the trailer; it’s beautiful. And it doesn’t take all day (unless you’re on a dialup).
In the mean time, brace yourself and go see Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover tomorrow at Lincoln Center’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series (or, if you insist, Rendez-vous with Freedom Cinema series. Assayas will be at the screeningNow who’s all PC?) Read about it in Film Comment, where Gavin Smith saw it at Cannes. Smith called it the best undistributed film of 2002. Assayas’ll be there. Order tickets online, if you can. Yesterday’s screening sold out++. Assayas was there yesterday, too, and we talked a bit about collaborating with anime studios, CG’ers, and Sonic Youth.
Subject: Poisonous insults. They’re used both to signal to your own ideological troops or to tar your critics with an invidious brush. If you can tell me what the hierarchy of venom, let me know. (Whatever the ranking, I think the whole world needs to take a freakin’ time out, or their mothers will be called.) Here are some options: